The findings suggest that dark matter particles interacted so that they "annihilated" each other, producing subatomic particles called quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks. This annihilation produced heat that would have kept the proto-stellar cloud of hydrogen and helium from cooling and shrinking and thus preventing fusion reactions from igniting.
"The heating can counteract the cooling, and so the star stops contracting for a while, forming a dark star" some 80 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang, said study leader Paolo Gondolo of the University of Utah.
Large and fluffy
These so-called dark stars, named for the song "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead, would contain mostly normal matter, in the form of hydrogen and helium molecules, but would be vastly larger (about 400 to 200,000 times wider) and "fluffier" than the sun and other stars.
It is conceivable that dark stars exist today, though they would not emit visible light. Instead they would produce gamma rays, neutrinos and antimatter such as positrons and antiprotons, Gondolo said.
Cool.
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