Premature black hole death of Population III stars by dark matter

Abstract

Population III stars were the first generation of stars, formed in minihalos of roughly primordial element abundances, and therefore metal-free. They are thought to have formed at the cores of dense dark matter clouds. Interactions between baryons and dark matter can therefore have had an important impact on their evolution. In this paper we consider the capture of non- or weakly-annihilating dark matter by these early massive stars. In a wide region of parameter space, interactions of dark matter with baryons lead to premature death of the star as a black hole. We sketch how this modification of the standard evolutionary history of Population III stars might impact the epoch of reionisation, by modifying the amount of UV emission, the transition to Population II star formation, and the X-ray and radio emission from accretion onto the black hole remnants. Signals of massive black holes originating from Population III stars could be observed through gravitational waves from their mergers. Finally, the observation of pair-instability supernovae could effectively preclude premature black hole death across a wide range of parameter space, ranging in mass from m DM ∼ 0.1 GeV to m DM ∼ m Pl.

General-relativistic instability in rapidly accreting supermassive stars: The impact of rotation

“…Models of adiabatic contraction for star formation indicate ambiant dark matter densities ≲ 10 −10 g cm −3 in protostars (Freese et al 2009). On the other hand, if dark matter is made of weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPs), the densities can be increased by orders of magnitude, thanks to the interactions with the baryonic gas, that allows to capture the dark matter particles in the gravitational potential well of the star (Spolyar et al 2008;Taoso et al 2008Taoso et al , 2010Freese et al 2010;Kouvaris & Tinyakov 2011;Ellis 2022). In this case, the captured dark matter component converges to a highly centralised thermal density profile ∝ exp(−r 2 /r 2 χ ) (Taoso et al 2008).…”

New Constraints on Macroscopic Dark Matter Using Radar Meteor Detectors

“…We note that this formula, derived for collisions with individual particles, was shown in Ref. [43] to be equivalent to the result in the fluid regime. In the limit of large DM mass, this also agrees with the continuous energy loss formalism discussed in Ref.…”

“…The equations for the radar cross section σ RCS depend on the DM mass and cross section through the electron line density and the plasma radius, given in Eqs. ( 26) and (43), respectively. Using these, we convert the DM velocity distribution for a particular DM mass and cross section into an RCS distribution.…”

Dark matter capture in celestial objects: treatment across kinematic and interaction regimes

“…For non-annihilating DM, very large amounts of DM can accumulate over time due to a lack of depletion through annihilation, leading to interesting observables such as eventual destruction via black holes from over-accumulation, or changes to stellar evolution. The range of objects considered in the past includes the Earth and the Sun , Jupiter [1,[24][25][26][27], Brown Dwarfs [28,29], Uranus [30], Exoplanets [28], White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars [29,, and other stars [69][70][71][72][73][74]. The transition cross section σ tr is the cross section corresponding to a mean free path of the size of the celestial object, and therefore the transition between the single and multi-scatter interaction regime.…”