Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics<\/a>, the research shows that the energy released from dark matter decay could alter the chemistry of early galaxies enough to cause some of them to directly collapse into black holes rather than forming stars.<\/p>\nThe result is timely since NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope continues to observe unusually large black holes in the early universe that could have formed by direct collapse. Astronomers had believed this process requires a coincidence of nearby stars shining onto pre-stellar gas and so expected it to be rare.<\/p>\n
Aggarwal\u2019s team goes beyond the standard approach by using dark matter\u2014the unknown 85% of the matter in the universe that helps form galaxies. They show that if dark matter decays, it can leak a small amount of its energy into the gas and supercharge the direct collapse rate. Each decaying dark matter particle would only need to inject an amount of energy that is a billion trillionth the energy of a single AA battery.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur study suggests that decaying dark matter could profoundly reshape the evolution of the first stars and galaxies, with widespread effects across the universe,\u201d Aggarwal says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the James Webb Space Telescope now revealing more supermassive black holes in the early universe, this mechanism may help bridge the gap between theory and observation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flip Tanedo, associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Aggarwal\u2019s doctoral coadvisor, says ideas related to this work had been bouncing around his group since 2018.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first galaxies are essentially balls of pristine hydrogen gas whose chemistry is incredibly sensitive to atomic-scale energy injection,\u201d says Tanedo, a coauthor on the paper.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are the properties that we want for a dark matter detector\u2014the signature of these \u2018detectors\u2019 might be the supermassive black holes that we see today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research team, which included James Dent of Sam Houston State University in Texas and Tao Xu of the University of Oklahoma, modeled the thermo-chemical dynamics of the gas in the presence of decaying axions and found that a window of dark matter masses between 24 and 27 electronvolts could produce the conditions to seed direct collapse black holes.<\/p>\n
Tanedo points out that the work stemmed from a series of coincidences that brought the right people together at the right time, including a series of workshops that connected particle physicists, cosmologists, and astrophysicists to discuss the big questions in their field.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe showed that the right dark matter environment can help make the \u2018coincidence\u2019 of direct collapse black holes much more likely,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the same way, the support for interdisciplinary work helped make the \u2018coincidence\u2019 leading to this work possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and a UCR Hellman Fellowship.<\/p>\n
Source: UC Riverside<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Dark matter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[8150,10239,199,79,193],"class_list":{"0":"post-594123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-black-holes","9":"tag-dark-matter","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}