Theory Posits Early Stars Powered By Dark Matter

ethericalzen writes "A BBC article highlights a theory that the first stars may have been powered by dark matter. A group of US scientists published a paper in Physical Review Letters speculating that, unlike the stars of today, which are powered by nuclear fusion, early stars might have been powered by the abundant dark matter crowding the universe after the Big Bang. The theory suggests that these stars would have collided and destroyed one another before nuclear fusion had a chance take hold." The BBC perhaps overstates the certainty with which the dark-matter theory is held, and doesn't mention that the postulated properties of such particles are completely speculative.

Comments

Re:Overstates?

[John Hasler]

> How do you overstate the certainty of dark matter? Last I read, the only serious
> alternatives were that there's more interstellar dust than we thought...

That doesn't work because you can't get the observed distribution with baryonic matter.

Re:Your tax dollars funded this, but no article

[red_pete]

Here's the LANL preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1724v2

Re:Light from nothing?

[MikeDX]

Actually.. methane and oxygen are colourless... My physics teacher practically beat us to death with that one.

Re: Very Very Dark Matter

[Dice]

That's not accurate, there is much evidence supporting the idea of massive particles which do not interact via the electromagnetic, strong, or weak forces. There is, for instance, the observation of lensing in the Bullet Cluster last year which put to rest many of the modified gravity theories. There is also the recent observation reported earlier on /. of a galaxy composed of stars whose motion can be described without dark matter. The latter observation is particularly damning, if the effect were due to a misunderstanding on our part of the gravitational force or some quantum mechanical property of normal matter then it should be seen everywhere.

Re: Very Very Dark Matter

[lgw]

There is zero evidence of Dark Matter. Circumstantial but it's just like string theory: a lot of take, no proof. There's as much evidence for dark matter as there is for black holes or neutron stars or anything else in cosmology that we can't actually visit.

Dark Matter was just one hypothesis among many for why galaxy rotation wasn't as expected until we started getting the very precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation a couple of years ago. That made it clear that the matter mass of the early universe was about 80% non-baryonic, reacting to gravity but not light pressure. The percentage and distribution was predicted well by a dark matter theory, and it has explained some later observations as well.