Did 'Dark Matter' Create The First Stars?

Head of the "guitar nebula". The formation contains a fast moving pulsar followed by a tail of gas. Biermann and Kusenko's postulations about dark matter could explain puzzlingly high pulsar velocities, which lead to such cone-shaped features. Images are from the Planetary Camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994 (left) and 2001 (right). (Image: Hubble Space Telescope (NASA/ESA), Shami Shatterjee)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2006) — Dark matter may have played a major role in creating stars at the very beginnings of the universe. If that is the case, however, the dark matter must consist of particles called "sterile neutrinos". Peter Biermann of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, and Alexander Kusenko, of the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that when sterile neutrinos decay, it speeds up the creation of molecular hydrogen. This process could have helped light up the first stars only some 20 to 100 million years after the big bang. This first generation of stars then ionised the gas surrounding them, some 150 to 400 million years after the big bang. All of this provides a simple explanation to some rather puzzling observations concerning dark matter, neutron stars, and antimatter (Physical Review Letters, March 10, 2006).