Dark Stars: The First Stars in the Universe Could Have Been Powered by Annihilating Dark Matter - by PaulMattSutter
. That self-interaction can’t be too strong, however, otherwise the dark matter would’ve clumped up into tiny little balls or just annihilated itself long ago.
This “interact but not very much” hypothesis makes it challenging for astronomers to come up with ways toThe extremely early universe, when it was only a couple hundred million years old, was very different than today. For one, it was a lot denser, with all the material of the cosmos crammed into a much smaller volume. Second, it was a lot darker, because stars and galaxies had not yet formed.
Back then, the universe was composed of dark matter and neutral hydrogen and helium. Slowly, over the course of eons, all that material began to gravitationally collapse, forming ever larger structures. The first protostars started as dense clumps no bigger than a thousandth the size of the Sun. In the traditional picture of the formation of the first stars, those clumps steadily grew to behemoths a hundred times the size of the Sun, powered by nuclear fusion in their cores.
In this scenario, the first stars are not powered by nuclear fusion, but instead by annihilating dark matter in their cores. The research team calls them “dark stars,” even though the stars themselves are still made of mostly normal matter. These stars don’t exist in the modern universe, because the densities of dark matter are too low, so we can’t see them in the galaxy today.
But the researchers hope that the James Webb Space Telescope, specifically designed to study the early universe and the formation of the first stars, might be able to see these dark stars directly.
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