Erratum: Observational constraints on supermassive dark stars

Abstract

The Letter ‘Observational constraints on supermassive dark stars’ was published in Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 407, L74–L78 (2010). An error has been uncovered in the Letter. Owing to a numerical mistake, the formation rate of 1–2 × 108 M cold dark matter haloes used was too high by factors of ≈10–30. As a result, the observational constraints on f SMDS, the fraction of 1–2 × 108 M haloes that form 107 M supermassive dark stars (SMDS), should be relaxed accordingly. The corrected halo formation rate is presented as a function of redshift in Fig. 1. Because of the smaller number of haloes involved, the scatter between adjacent redshift bins is now considerably larger than in the original plot. By fitting a second-order polynomial (thick solid line) to the simulation data, we estimate that the formation rate of 1–2 × 108 M haloes is dn/dt ≈ 5 × 10−9 haloes per comoving Mpc3 and year at z = 10, and dn/dt ≈ 1 × 10−9 haloes per comoving Mpc3 and year at z = 15. This converts into Ṅ ≈ 580 haloes forming per unit redshift and arcmin2 at z = 10, and Ṅ ≈ 30 haloes forming per unit redshift and arcmin2 at z = 15. The resulting constraints on f SMDS, as a function of the SMDS lifetime τ , are plotted in Fig. 2 for our scenario A (where SMDS continue to form at z ≈ 10 rather than merely survive from previous