Gravitational Phase Transition of Heavy Neutrino Matter

Abstract

We study the phase transition of a system of self-gravitating neutrinos in the presence of a large radiation density background in the framework of the Thomas-Fermi model. We show that, by cooling a non-degenerate gas of massive neutrinos below some critical temperature, a condensed phase emerges, consisting of quasi-degenerate supermassive neutrino stars. These compact dark objects could play an important role in structure formation in this universe, as they might in fact provide the seeds for galactic nuclei and quasi-stellar objects.

Comments: 9 pages incl. 2 postscript figures