Paper detail

Constraining Dark Matter Inside Stars Using Spectroscopic Binaries and a Modified Mass-Luminosity Relation

The presence of a dissipative dark matter (DM) sector may allow for the trapping of a significant DM mass inside stars, either during structure formation or by accretion over their lifetime, influencing stellar behavior well into the Main Sequence stage. Motivated by this scenario, we place an upper bound on the fractional DM mass within current-day Main Sequence stars. Using double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2 stars), gravitational masses are extracted and contrasted with luminous masses, derived using a modified mass-luminosity relation which accounts for the effect of DM. High-accuracy mass and luminosity data from a sample of 486 binary stars in the $0.18 < M/M_\odot < 31$ mass range are partitioned into appropriate mass domains and analyzed. A 95% C.L. upper limit of sub-5% is found for the subset of 263 stars in the $1 < M/M_\odot < 2.4$ regime.