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[15.13] Consequences of Accretion onto Primordial Compact Objects

M. C. Miller (University of Maryland)

Many lines of evidence suggest that nonbaryonic dark matter constitutes roughly 0.3 of the critical closure density, but the composition of this dark matter is unknown. One class of candidates for the dark matter is stellar-mass compact objects formed in the early universe. Specific candidates of this type include black holes formed at the epoch of the QCD phase transition, quark stars, and boson stars. We explore the effects of accretion onto these objects, and show that the resulting radiation may have significant effects on ionization (and hence on the observed CMB power spectrum) and on the formation of the earliest galaxies. Observations of radiation from high redshifts can therefore be used to constrain the contribution of primordial compact objects to dark matter. This work is supported in part by NASA grant NAG 5-9756 at Maryland.