Dark matter and the suppression of stellar core convection

Abstract

The existence of weakly interacting massive particles has been put forward to explain both the dark matter conundrum and the solar neutrino deficiency. Provided that these particles do not annihilate, they can be extremely efficient at energy transport inside stellar cores. They can supplement radiation and, under the specific circumstances which are analyzed in this paper, even suppress core convection. This paper gives an analytic condition under which core convection stops and illustrates the approach with an analysis of the main sequence. In particular, it is shown that central convection is suppressed inside low-mass stars (M smaller than 0.5 solar mass), while massive stars are not perturbed.