Related papers: Dark Matter Annihilation and Pair-Instability Supe…
Very massive stars are radiation pressure dominated. Before running out of viable nuclear fuel, they can reach a thermodynamic state where electron-positron pair-production robs them of radiation support, triggering their collapse.…
In standard stellar evolution, stars with masses ranging from approximately $150$ to $240 M_\odot$ are expected to evolve to a pair instability supernova with no black hole (BH) remnant. This evolutionary behavior leads to a predicted gap…
Growing theoretical evidence suggests that the first generation of stars may have been quite massive (~100-300 solar masses). If they retain their high mass until death, such stars will, after about 3Myr, make pair-instability supernovae.…
Mergers of two stellar origin black holes are a prime source of gravitational waves and are under intensive investigations. One crucial ingredient in their modeling has so far been neglected. Pair-instability pulsation supernovae with…
We demonstrate the power of the black hole mass gap as a novel probe of fundamental physics. New light particles that couple to the Standard Model can act as an additional source of energy loss in the cores of population-III stars,…
The recent detection of GW190521 stimulated ideas on how to populate the predicted black hole pair-instability mass gap. One proposed scenario is the dynamical merger of two stars below the pair instability regime forming a star with a…
In the standard picture of stellar evolution, pair-instability -- the energy loss in stellar cores due to electron-positron pair production -- is predicted to prevent the collapse of massive stars into black holes with mass in the range…
Many theories of dark matter (DM) predict that DM particles can be captured by stars via scattering on ordinary matter. They subsequently condense into a DM core close to the center of the star and eventually annihilate. In this work, we…
Pair-instability should prevent the direct formation of black holes above about $50M_\odot$ creating a pair-instability mass gap. Yet gravitational-wave observations have detected black holes in this mass range. These systems can be…
Dark matter (DM) annihilation can power the first generation of stars as long lived dark stars (DSs) that grow to supermassive scales $M_{\rm DS}\gtrsim 10^{5} M_{\odot}$ and eventually collapse into heavy black holes that could seed the…
Stellar evolution theory predicts a "gap" in the black hole birth function caused by the pair instability. Presupernova stars that have a core mass below some limiting value, Mlo, after all pulsational activity is finished, collapse to…
Standard stellar evolution models predict that black holes in the range of approximately $50 - 140 M_\odot$ should not exist directly from stellar evolution. This gap appears because stars with masses between 100 and 240 $M_\odot$ are…
We study the effects of WIMP dark matter (DM) on the collapse and evolution of the first stars in the Universe. Using a stellar evolution code, we follow the pre-Main Sequence (MS) phase of a grid of metal-free stars with masses in the…
We show that dark stars, which are dark-matter-powered stars in the early universe, can grow by accretion to masses in the range $\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^4\right )-\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^7\right)\,{M_\odot}$ before the general-relativistic…
We present new evolutionary models of primordial very massive stars, with initial masses ranging from $100\,\mathrm{{M}_{\odot}}$ to $1000\,\mathrm{{M}_{\odot}}$, that extend from the main sequence until the onset of dynamical instability…
The transit of primordial black holes through a white dwarf causes localized heating around the trajectory of the black hole through dynamical friction. For sufficiently massive black holes, this heat can initiate runaway thermonuclear…
We investigate hydrostatic configurations of asymmetric dark matter (DM) spheres in scenarios where fermionic DM can propagate into extra spatial dimensions, while Standard Model fields remain confined to ordinary three dimensions. As the…
We calculate the extent to which collisionless dark matter impacts the stability of supermassive stars $(M\gtrsim10^4\,M_\odot)$. We find that, depending on the star's mass, a dark matter content in excess of ${\sim}1\%$ by mass throughout…
The formation and evolution of superdense clumps (or subhalos) is studied. Such clumps of dark matter (DM) can be produced by many mechanisms, most notably by spiky features in the spectrum of inflationary perturbations and by cosmological…
The accretion of dark matter (DM) into astrophysical black holes slowly increases their mass. The rate of this mass accretion depends on the DM model and the model parameters. If this mass accretion effect can be measured accurately enough,…