Cooling of dark neutron stars
Abstract
We study the cooling of isolated dark-matter-admixed neutron stars, employing a realistic nuclear equation of state and realistic nuclear pairing gaps, together with fermionic dark matter of variable particle mass and dark-matter fraction. The related parameter space is scanned for the stellar structural and cooling properties. We find that a consistent description of all current cooling data requires fast direct Urca cooling and reasonable proton 1S0 gaps. Dark matter affects the cooling properties by a modification of the nuclear density profiles, but also changes stellar radius and maximum mass. Possible signals of a large dark matter content could be a very massive but slow-cooling star or a very light but fast-cooling star.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.09704,
title = {Cooling of dark neutron stars},
author = {B. X. Zhou and H. C. Das and J. B. Wei and G. F. Burgio and Z. H. Li and H. -J. Schulze},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.09704},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
14 pages, 10 figures, Published in Phys. Rev. D