Understand
The annihilation of huge quantities of captured dark matter (DM) particles inside low-mass stars has been shown to change some of the stellar properties, such as the star's effective temperature or the way the energy is transported throughout the star.
- While in the classical picture, without DM, a star of 1 M_sun is expected to have a radiative interior during the main sequence, the same star evolving in a halo of DM with a density rho_x > 10^8 GeV cm^-3 will develop a convective core in order to evacuate the energy from DM annihilation in a more efficient way.
- This convective core leaves a discontinuity in the density and sound-speed profiles that can be detected by the analysis of the stellar oscillations.
- In this paper we present an approach towards the use of asteroseismology to detect the signature produced by the presence of DM inside a star, and we propose a new methodology to infer the properties of a DM halo from the stellar oscillations (such as the product of the DM density and the DM particle-nucleon scattering cross-section).