18 February 2020Dark Stars

Dark Stars (DS) are stellar objects made (almost entirely) of ordinary atomic material but powered by the heat from Dark Matter (DM) annihilation (rather than by fusion). Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), among the best candidates for DM, can be their own antimatter and can accumulate inside the star, with their annihilation products thermalizing with and heating the DS. Though DM constituted only <0.1% of the mass of the star, this amount was sufficient to power the star for millions to billions of years. Depending on their DM environment, early DSs can become very massive and very bright and potentially detectable with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Once the DM runs out and the dark star dies, it may collapse to a black hole; thus DSs can provide seeds for the supermassive black holes observed throughout the Universe and at early times.