Stars very close to the center of our galaxy may be perpetually powered by dark matter, according to a team of astronomers who recently studied a distant light source.
This group of stars, known as the S Cluster stars, is just three light-years away from the center of the Milky Way (for reference, it’s about 26,000 light-years away from the center of our galaxy, which has a supermassive black hole at its center). While these stars are surprisingly young for stars in our galactic neighborhood, they don’t seem like stars that simply migrated to this part of the Milky Way after forming elsewhere. The region also contains some surprisingly massive stars, and fewer older stars than expected.
Reports say Space.comThe team hypothesizes that these strange stars may be accumulating dark matter to keep burning as fuel. Because models estimate there’s so much dark matter near the galaxy’s core, the stars are “forever young,” lead study author Isabel John, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, told Space.com. In effect, the stars have a long way to go before they start to run out of fuel. The team’s paper states: Currently hosted It has been posted on the preprint server arXiv, meaning it has not yet gone through the peer-review process.
Dark matter It appears to make up 27% of the universeBut so far, it has not been possible to detect it directly. In other words, astronomers cannot see dark matter at any wavelength using existing instruments. Instead, dark matter is teeth Dark matter is visibly present in everything from distant stars to massive star clusters. Although dark matter is invisible, its gravitational effects are evident. The jury is still out on whether there is just one source of dark matter (for example, the theoretical particle axion) or whether there are multiple unknowns that fall under the collective term dark matter.
The new paper is not the first to study how dark matter interacts with stars. Earlier this year, another team of researchers found that neutron stars – the extremely dense remnants of stars –Possible source of dark matterLast July, another research team discovered that the Webb Telescope Stars powered by dark matter.
“According to the star formation model, stars [0.326 light-years] “It is outside the central black hole where the stars of the S cluster are found,” the researchers wrote. “Rather, the stars must have formed elsewhere and migrated towards the galactic centre. Conversely, our observations suggest that the stars in this region are young. [less than or approximately equal to 15 million years old]This suggests that stars may have formed more locally.”
In their letter, the research team also introduced a dark matter star version. Hertzsprung-Russell diagramis a chart that maps the luminosity and effective temperature of stars. The stars in the fainter versions of this diagram are cooler than the stars in the established diagram, but are roughly the same luminosity. “The dark matter density in these stars is continually replenished, giving these stars immortality and resolving the multi-stellar anomaly,” the team wrote.
By mapping out how these stars, which may be driven by dark matter, evolve and age, the researchers can better characterize how dark matter manifests itself in the universe and how it interacts with regular matter. 30-meter telescope This will allow for more precise measurements of stars near the galaxy’s centre, which could reveal whether dark matter has any effect on stars in that region.
more: These violent collisions could produce dark matter
