  Dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles is predicted
to become gravitationally captured and accumulate in stars. While the
subsequent annihilations of such particles lead to the injection of energy into
stellar cores, elastically scattering dark matter particles do not generally
yield enough energy to observably impact stellar phenomenology. Dark matter
particles which scatter inelastically with nuclei (such that they reconcile the
annual modulation reported by DAMA with the null results of CDMS and other
experiments), however, can be captured by and annihilate in compact stars at a
much higher rate. As a result, old white dwarf stars residing in high dark
matter density environments can be prevented from cooling below several
thousand degrees Kelvin. Observations of old, cool white dwarfs in dwarf
spheroidal galaxies, or in the inner kiloparsec of the Milky Way, can thus
potentially provide a valuable test of the inelastic dark matter hypothesis.
