Dark Matter Stars in the Early Universe?

OriginalArlen writes "UniverseToday reports new research which suggests dark matter could have condensed to form 'dark stars' in the early universe. These stars would have been very massive and burned very slowly, fueled by non-fusion reactions, they could still be with us. Astronomers hope to better constrain theories of early galaxy and star formation with observations of gravitational lensing events caused by these ghosts of the primordial universe."

Comments

Re:Wouldn't they tend to collapse?

[secPM_MS]

As matter clouds condenses, gravitational energy is released. This energy has to be radiated away for the collapse to proceed, as the collapse is opposed by the thermal kinetic energy of the matter in the cloud. This was a major problem in the early universe when the abundance of metals was so low that radiation cooling was less efficient. If dark matter interacts very weakly with normal matter and electromagnetic fields, cooling is going to be very slow indeed. We know that dark matter exists and that it forms concentrations on the scale of large galaxies. We do not have strong evidence for the concentration of dark matter in the solar system, where it could result in apparent radial variations in solar or planetary masses. I supect that cooling of stellar mass dark matter clouds is rather difficult. Once somebody figures out how to observe the stuff and its properties, we can better understand what we see and what we should be looking for.