Dark stars may not just be for Grateful Dead fans anymore.In a new paper uploaded to arXiv, Rutgers University astrophysics professor Matthew R. Buckley puts forth a truly wild hypothesis: It might be possible to build worlds out of dark matter.
Dark Compact Planets
Authors:
Tolos et al
Abstract:
We investigate compact objects formed by dark matter admixed with ordinary matter made of neutron star matter and white dwarf material. We consider non-self annihilating dark matter with an equation-of-state given by an interacting Fermi gas. We find new stable solutions, dark compact planets, with Earth-like masses and radii from few Km to few hundred Km for weakly interacting dark matter. For the strongly interacting dark matter case, we obtain dark compact planets with Jupiter-like masses and radii of few hundred Km. These objects could be formed primordially and accrete white dwarf material subsequently. They could be detected by observing exoplanets with unusually small radii. Moreover, we find that the recently observed 2 M⊙ pulsars set limits on the amount of dark matter inside neutron stars which is, at most, 10−6M⊙.
