Influence of dark matter on gravitational stability of isothermal gas clouds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark matter gravitationally influences the stability of isothermal gas clouds in the interstellar medium, revealing that dark matter can significantly increase their maximum stable mass and size.

Contribution

It provides an analytical study of dark matter's impact on ISM cloud stability, highlighting how even small amounts of dark matter can alter cloud properties.

Findings

Dark matter increases the stable radius of gas clouds.

Dark matter can quadruple the maximum stable mass of clouds.

Higher dark matter density destabilizes the gas clouds.

Abstract

To date, the presence of dark matter (DM) can be judged only by its gravitational interaction on the visible matter. It is therefore important to find the consequences of this interaction, which can then help to determine both the DM properties and parameters and the dynamics and evolution of visible matter. The gravitational influence of dark matter on the stability of interstellar medium (ISM), the progenitor of stars and star clusters, was considered. An isothermal self-gravity gas was taken as a suitable model describing ISM, particles interacting only gravitationally were considered as DM. The results obtained by analytical methods show that even a small amount of fast DM particles significantly increases the stable radius of the gas cloud and the corresponding mass while a higher relative density of DM destabilizes the gas. It was shown that with typical parameters of ISM and DM, its presence increases the maximum stable mass of isothermal cloud by a factor of four and the radius by five.