Speaker
Description
The first stars formed from pristine hydrogen and helium at high redshift and were much more massive than typical stars of subsequent generations. If these stars formed near the centers of their dark matter minihalos, the dark matter would have contracted around the compact baryonic object. The most massive stars would have ended their lives by collapsing to black holes, leaving a black hole remnant surrounded by a dark matter spike. Furthermore, if the first stage of stellar evolution is a Dark Star phase during which the star is powered by dark matter annihilations, the first stars would have grown to be even larger, possibly even becoming supermassive, and leaving correspondingly larger black hole remnants. In this talk I’ll discuss potential signatures of the first stars via indirect detection of annihilation in their dark matter spikes, as well as existing constraints from various experiments.
