Dark Stars: Cradle of Giant Black Holes express
Right after the Big Bang, unusual luminaries could be born — dark stars. Unlike the Sun, they didn’t burn nuclear fuel but fed on collisions of dark matter particles, which release energy. Like a snowball rolling downhill, such a star rapidly sucked in gas, gaining up to millions of solar masses. Its own gravity created enormous spacetime curvature, and the star collapsed into a black hole. This scenario was predicted by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman: no internal pressure can stop such a collapse. This is likely how the seeds of supermassive black holes, which we see in the centers of galaxies, formed. Without dark stars, ordinary stars wouldn’t have had enough time to grow these giants in the young Universe. Amazing fact: a million-solar-mass dark star would stretch out to Pluto’s orbit, yet its surface would be colder than an incandescent light bulb.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2511.08578
We show that dark stars, which are dark-matter-powered stars in the early universe, can grow by accretion to masses in the range $$\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^4\right )-\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^7\right)\,{M_\odot}$$ before the general-relativistic Feynman-Chandrasekhar instability causes their dynamical collapse to black holes. These accreting dark star configurations avoid standard stellar nuclear- and weak-interaction evolution that would lead to their demise long before they reached this supermassive size. Remarkably, this mechanism for supermassive black hole (SMBH) genesis is relatively robust to initial dark star mass, formation epoch, accretion rate and its history. The SMBHs produced this way can serve as seeds for even larger SMBHs $$({\gtrsim}10^9\,M_\odot)$$ that have been discovered at high redshift.
A giant dark star would span the distance from the Sun to Pluto, yet its surface would give off less heat than a household light bulb — a stunning contrast between size and temperature.