Related papers: Dark Matter capture and annihilation on the First …

First-generation (Population III) stars in the universe play an important role inearly enrichment of heavy elements in galaxies and intergalactic medium and thus affect the history of galaxies. The physical and chemical properties of…

In the local Universe, star formation is typically inefficient both globally and when considered as the fraction of gas converted into stars per local free-fall time. An important exception to this inefficiency is regions of high…

The properties of Population III (Pop III) stars impact many aspects of primeval structure formation such as the onset of cosmological reionization and early chemical enrichment. However, in spite of over twenty years of numerical…

The nature of the cosmic dark matter is unknown. The most compelling hypothesis is that dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the 100 GeV mass range. Such particles would annihilate in the galactic halo,…

If the dark matter is part of a hidden sector with only very feeble couplings to the Standard Model, the lightest particle in the hidden sector will generically be long-lived and could come to dominate the energy density of the universe…

The dark matter distribution on small scales may depend on the the properties of the first generation of dark matter halos to form, which is in turn determined by the microphysics of the dark matter particles. We overview the microphysics…

Stars that evolve near the Galactic massive black hole show strange behaviors. The spectroscopic features of these stars show that they must be old. But their luminosities are much higher than the amounts that are predicted by the current…

First, the formation of first objects driven by dark matter is revisited by high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. It is revealed that dark matter haloes of ~10^4M_sun can produce first luminous objects with the aid of dark matter cusps.…

We derive the effects of DM decays and annihilations on structure formation. We consider moderately massive DM particles (sterile neutrinos and light DM), as they are expected to give the maximum contribution to heating and reionization.…

Current numerical studies suggest that the first galaxies formed a few stars at a time and were enriched only gradually by the first heavy elements. However, the large box sizes in these models cannot resolve primordial supernova explosions…

Let's be frank: we all love WIMP dark matter (DM). However, thermal equilibrium may not be reached between the visible and dark sectors. The only interaction guaranteed between them is gravity. Gravitational DM could be generated by the…

An overview is presented of the main properties of dark matter haloes, as we know them from observations, essentially from rotation curves around spiral and dwarf galaxies. Detailed rotation curves are now known for more than a thousand…

For the first time, we have a plausible and complete accounting of matter and energy in the Universe. Expressed a fraction of the critical density it goes like this: neutrinos, between 0.3% and 15%; stars, between 0.3% and 0.6%; baryons…

It has frequently been suggested that the stellar IMF in galaxies was top-heavy at early times. This would be plausible physically if the IMF depends on a mass scale such as the Jeans mass that was higher at earlier times because of the…

The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal…

One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of dark matter. Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable universe, from the…

Cosmological structure formation predicts that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures and streams, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth mass microhalos. If these structures persist…

Gravitational potential fluctuations driven by bursty star formation can kinematically 'heat up' dark matter at the centres of dwarf galaxies. A key prediction of such models is that, at a fixed dark matter halo mass, dwarfs with a higher…

Prompt cusps are the densest quasi-equilibrium dark matter objects; one forms at the instant of collapse within every isolated peak of the initial cosmological density field. They have power-law density profiles, $\rho \propto r^{-1.5}$…

Dark matter (DM) can be captured in celestial bodies after scattering and losing sufficient energy to become gravitationally bound. We derive a general framework that describes the current DM distribution inside celestial objects, which…