Dark Matter that can form Dark Stars

Understand

The first stars to form in the Universe may be powered by the annihilation of weakly interacting dark matter particles.

• These so-called dark stars, if observed, may give us a clue about the nature of dark matter.
• Here we examine which models for particle dark matter satisfy the conditions for the formation of dark stars.
• We find that in general models with thermal dark matter lead to the formation of dark stars, with few notable exceptions: heavy neutralinos in the presence of coannihilations, annihilations that are resonant at dark matter freeze-out but not in dark stars, some models of neutrinophilic dark matter annihilating into neutrinos only and lighter than about 50 GeV.