Towards the use of asteroseismology to investigate the nature of dark matter

Abstract

The annihilation of huge quantities of captured dark matter (DM) particles inside low-mass stars has been shown to change some of the stellar properties, such as the star's effective temperature or the way the energy is transported throughout the star. While in the classical picture, without DM, a star of 1 M_sun is expected to have a radiative interior during the main sequence, the same star evolving in a halo of DM with a density rho_x > 10^8 GeV cm^-3 will develop a convective core in order to evacuate the energy from DM annihilation in a more efficient way. This convective core leaves a discontinuity in the density and sound-speed profiles that can be detected by the analysis of the stellar oscillations. In this paper we present an approach towards the use of asteroseismology to detect the signature produced by the presence of DM inside a star, and we propose a new methodology to infer the properties of a DM halo from the stellar oscillations (such as the product of the DM density and the DM particle-nucleon scattering cross-section).

6 pages, 4 figures. v2 matches published version in MNRAS

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• On asymmetric dark matter constraints from the asteroseismology of a subgiant star
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• Acoustic modes of pulsating axion stars: Non-radial oscillations
• Dark Dwarfs: Dark Matter-Powered Sub-Stellar Objects Awaiting Discovery at the Galactic Center
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• The Sterile-Active Neutrino Flavor Model: the Imprint of Dark Matter on the Electron Neutrino Spectra
• Self-gravitating quantum stars with a globally relevant Bohm potential
• Dark-Matter-Powered Population III Evolution: Lifetimes, Rotation, and Quasi-Homogeneity in massive Stars
• Probing Heavy Dark Matter in Red Giants
• Constraints on the Axion-Photon Coupling Using Stellar Modelling
• Astroparticle physics with compact objects