Dark Stars: Dark Matter in the First Stars leads to a New Phase of Stellar Evolution

Abstract

The first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the universe may be Dark Stars, powered by dark matter heating rather than by fusion. Weakly interacting massive particles, which are their own antiparticles, can annihilate and provide an important heat source for the first stars in the the universe. This talk presents the story of these Dark Stars. We make predictions that the first stars are very massive ($\sim 800M_{\odot }$), cool (6000 K), bright ($\sim 10^6{L}_{\odot }$), long-lived ($\sim 10^6$ years), and probable precursors to (otherwise unexplained) supermassive black holes. Later, once the initial DM fuel runs out and fusion sets in, DM annihilation can predominate again if the scattering cross section is strong enough, so that a Dark Star is born again.

arXiv comment5 pages, Conference Proceeding for IAU Symposium 255: Low-Metallicity Star Formaion: From the First Stars to Dwarf Galaxies

References in corpus (14)

• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• The Nucleosynthetic Signature of Population III
• The Formation of the First Star in the Universe
• In the Beginning: The First Sources of Light and the Reionization of the Universe
• The First Stars
• Formation of Primordial Stars in a LCDM Universe
• Formation of z ~ 6 quasars from hierarchical galaxy mergers
• Dark matter and the first stars: a new phase of stellar evolution
• Dark Matter Candidates: A Ten-Point Test
• The first generation of stars in LCDM cosmology
• Dark Matter capture and annihilation on the First Stars: preliminary estimates
• The impact of dark matter decays and annihilations on the formation of the first structures
• Dark Matter Capture in the First Stars: a Power Source and Limit on Stellar Mass
• The Effect of Dark Matter on the First Stars: A New Phase of Stellar Evolution

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Dark Stars: A Review