Abstract
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) already begun to revolutionize our view of the early Universe in at least two significant ways:
- It found an unexpectedly large number of very bright, compact, red luminous sources (``red dots'') existed when the Universe was less than five hundred million years old
- JWST data further strengthens the need for a mechanism to seed the very massive Black Holes powering the most distant quasars observed.
Combined, those two problems indicate that the current understanding of the formation of the first stars and galaxies is, at best, incomplete. Colgate undergraduates are invited to help investigate a possible solution to
both of those puzzles: Dark Stars (i.e. stars powered by Dark Matter annihilations) and their remnants. The Dark Star (DS) hypothesis is already consistent with JWST data, as recently shown by Cosmin Ilie, Jillian Paulin (Colgate '23) and Katherine Freese in PNAS 120 (30) 2023, a work for which we won the National Academy of Sciences Cozzarelli Prize.
Students involved in this research will help elucidate the nature of dark matter and how it influences the formation and evolution of the first stars in the Unvierse. Specifically, depending on interest and skills, they would:
- Help numerically model Dark Stars with the state of the art code MESA
- Find Dark Stars or Dark Star candidates by using publicly available JWST data
- Identify, in publicly available data, Supermassive Black Hole remnants that could be seeded by Dark Stars