Dark Matter annihilations in Pop III stars

Understand

We study the impact of the capture and annihilation of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) on the evolution of Pop III stars.

• With a suitable modification of the Geneva stellar evolution code, we study the evolution of 20 and 200 M$_\odot$ stars in Dark Matter Haloes with densities between 10$^{8}$ and $10^{11}$ GeV/cm$^3$ during the core H-burning phase, and, for selected cases, until the end of the core He-burning phase.
• We find that for WIMP densities higher than 5.3 $10^{10}(\sigma^{SD}_p/10^{-38} {cm}^2)^{-1}$ GeV cm$^{-3}$ the core H-burning lifetime of $20 M_{\odot}$ and $200 M_{\odot}$ stars exceeds the age of the Universe, and stars are sustained only by WIMP annihilations.
• We determine the observational properties of these `frozen` objects and show that they can be searched for in the local Universe thanks to their anomalous mass-radius relation, which should allow unambiguous discrimination from normal stars.