Synthetic spectra of dark stars

The annihilation of dark matter particles in these environments may lead to the formation of so-called dark stars, which are predicted to be cooler, larger, more massive and potentially more long-lived than conventional population III stars. Here, we investigate the prospects of detecting high-redshift dark stars with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

We find that all dark stars with masses up to 10^3^ M_{sun}_ are intrinsically too faint to be detected by JWST at z above 6. However, by exploiting foreground galaxy clusters as gravitational telescopes, certain varieties of cool (T_eff_<=30000K) dark stars should be within reach at redshifts up to z{approx}10. If the lifetimes of dark stars are sufficiently long, many such objects may also congregate inside the first galaxies.