Stars near the center of our galaxy could be forever fueled by dark matter, according to a team of astronomers who recently studied the distant light sources.
The group of stars, known as S-cluster stars, are located just three light-years from the center of the Milky Way (for reference, we are about 26,000 light-years from the center of our Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole resides). its core). The stars are surprisingly young for their galactic environment, yet they don’t look like stars that simply migrated to this part of the Milky Way after forming in another location. The region also contains some surprisingly massive stars and fewer old stars than expected.
As reported by Space.comThe research team hypothesizes that these strange stars may be accreting dark matter, which they then use as fuel to keep burning. Since models estimate that there is a lot of dark matter near the galaxy’s core, the stars are “forever young,” as lead study author Isabelle John, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, told Space.com. In fact, the stars have a long, long way to go before they run out of fuel. The team’s paper is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv, which means that the peer review process has not yet been completed.
Dark matter appears to make up 27% of the universebut it has so far eluded direct detection. In other words, astronomers cannot see it in any light band with existing instruments. Instead, dark matter is seen through its effects on objects that Are visible, from distant stars to vast clusters of them. Although dark matter is invisible to us, its gravitational effects are clear. The jury is still out on whether there is a single culprit for dark matter—a theoretical particle like the axion, for example—or whether there are multiple unknowns that we have given the umbrella term dark matter.
The newly introduced paper is not the first to investigate how dark matter can interact with stars. Earlier this year, another team of researchers proposed that neutron stars – extremely dense stellar remnants –could actually be a source of dark matter. Last July, another team suggested that the Webb telescope stars that were powered by dark matter.
“Star formation models suggest that stars cannot form within a given space. [0.326 light-years] of the central black hole, where the S cluster stars are found,” the researchers wrote. “Rather, the stars must have formed elsewhere and migrated toward the galactic center. Conversely, observations suggest that stars in this region are young [less than or approximately equal to 15 million years old]suggesting that the stars may have formed more locally.”
In their letter, the team also introduced a dark matter star version of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagrama graph plotting the luminosity and effective temperatures of stars. Stars in the dark version of the diagram have lower temperatures than stars in the fixed diagram, but still have similar luminosities. “The dark matter density in these stars is continuously replenished, making these stars immortal and resolving multiple stellar anomalies,” the team wrote.
By mapping the ways in which these potentially dark matter-powered stars evolve and age, the team could better characterize how dark matter manifests itself in the universe and interacts with ordinary matter, the team also noted telescopes of the thirty meter class would allow for better measurements of stars near the Galactic Center, revealing whether dark matter has any influence on the stars in that region.
More: These violent collisions could produce dark matter