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:Your tax dollars funded this, but no article

[red_pete]

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

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.