How do people feel about extending this market for another year?

How would the neutralinos ever get cold enough to condense into a dark star? Starting with hundred MeV energies from when they were created during the Big Bang, and not interacting at all via electromagnetism…

@JonathanRay There are a few things going on. One is that neutralinos cool off as the universe expands. They don’t need to couple to photons to do this. See the attached note.

There is more to this story however. Cold dark matter does not, by itself, form dense collapsed objects. Baryons can because they can radiate away energy. However as baryons collapse they deepen the gravity well felt by dark matter and this transfers energy from the dark matter to the baryons. This feedback can create much larger dark matter densities than dark matter only halos can and these are what could lead to dark stars.

It's easiest to understand why this happens by imagining a spherical shell of baryons contracting and imagining a dark matter particle falling in to it. As the dark matted falls into the gravity well of the baryons it picks up speed until crosses the edge of the shell. Inside of the shell the dark matter particle maintains the same velocity until it leaves the shell. But because the shell is contracting, the dark matter particle leaves deeper in the gravity well than is entered, so has lost energy.
This argument shows spherically symmetric collapsing objects “cool” the dark matter. The non spherically symmetric case is more complicated but is largely similar.

Why don’t we already have their spectrum? Seems like it should be trivial to take the measurement

@JonathanRay Spectra have been taken but not with sufficient signal to noise to resolve the spectral lines.

@TomBouley They are very faint objects so it takes time to collect enough light to get a high quality spectrum and they have only been resently been identified as intersting.

The resolution date is in 1 year (September 2024). Are there instruments capable of obtaining the necessary high-res spectra in the next year?

@zQ4Z82W I'm not sure. I was under the impression that the JWST's NIRSpec could make these observations with sufficient observing time but I’m a theorist so don’t trust me here.
I’d be willing to extend the closing date if it’s not feasible to make this measurement in a year

Link to the preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01173

Supermassive Dark Star candidates seen by JWST?

The first generation of stars in the Universe is yet to be observed. There are two leading theories for those objects that mark the beginning of the cosmic dawn: hydrogen burning Population~III stars and Dark Stars, made of hydrogen and helium but powered by Dark Matter heating. The latter can grow to become supermassive ($M_\star\sim 10^6\Msun$) and extremely bright ($L\sim 10^9L_\odot$). We show that each of the following three objects: JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0 (at redshifts $z\in[11,14]$) are consistent with a Supermassive Dark Star interpretation, thus identifying, for the first time, Dark Star candidates.