Evolution of the First Stars with Dark Matter Burning
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Abstract
Recent theoretical studies have revealed the possibly important role of the capture and annihilation process of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) for the first stars. Using new evolutionary models of metal-free massive stars, we investigate the impact of such ``dark matter burning'' for the first stars in different environments of dark matter (DM) halos, in terms of the ambient WIMP density (rho_chi). We find that, in agreement with existing literature, stellar life times can be significantly prolonged for a certain range of rho_\chi (i.e., 10^{10} ~ 2*10^{11} GeV/cm3 may not undergo nuclear burning stages, confirming the previous work, and that ionizing photon fluxes from such DM supported stars are very weak. Delayed metal enrichment and slow reionization in the early universe would have resulted if most of the first stars had been born in DM halos with such high rho_\chi, unless it had been lowered significantly below the threshold for efficient DM burning on a short time scale.