Stars very close to the center of our galaxy could be permanently powered by dark matter, according to a team of astronomers who recently studied distant light sources.
The group of stars, known as the S cluster stars, is just three light-years from the center of the Milky Way (for comparison, we’re about 26,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, which hosts a supermassive black hole at its core). The stars are surprisingly young for their galactic neighborhood, yet they do not look like stars that simply migrated to this part of the Milky Way after forming elsewhere. The region also contains some surprisingly heavy stars and fewer old stars than expected.
As he states Space.comThe research team hypothesizes that these strange stars may be accreting dark matter, which they then use as fuel to keep them burning. Because models estimate that there is plenty of dark matter near the galaxy’s core, the stars are “eternally young,” study lead author Isabelle John, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, told Space.com. In reality, the stars have a long, long way to go before they run out of fuel. The team’s paper is currently hosted on the arXiv preprint server, which means it has not yet gone through the peer review process.
Dark matter It appears to make up 27% of the universe, but has so far eluded direct detection. In other words, astronomers cannot see it in any band of light with existing instruments. Instead, dark matter is seen through its effects on objects that they are visible, from distant stars to their vast clusters. Although dark matter is invisible to us, its gravitational effects are apparent. The jury is out on whether there is a single dark matter culprit—a theoretical particle such as the axion—or whether there are multiple unknowns to which we have given the umbrella term dark matter.
The newly introduced paper is hardly the first to explore how dark matter might interact with stars. Just earlier this year, another team of researchers suggested that neutron stars—the extremely dense remnants of stars—may indeed be the source of dark matter. Last July, another team suggested that the Webb telescope had detected stars that were powered by dark matter.
“Star formation models suggest that stars cannot form internally [0.326 light-years] the central black hole where the S-cluster stars are located,” the researchers wrote. “Rather, the stars must have formed elsewhere and migrated toward the galactic center. On the contrary, the observations suggest that the stars in this region are young [less than or approximately equal to 15 million years old]suggesting that stars may have formed more locally.”
In their letter, the team also presented a stellar version of dark matter Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a graph that maps stellar luminosities and effective temperatures. The stars in the dark version of the diagram have lower temperatures than the stars in the established diagram, but still have similar luminosities to them. “The density of dark matter in these stars is constantly replenished, providing these stars with immortality and resolving numerous 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 how it interacts with ordinary matter. The team also noted this thirty meter telescopes would be able to better measure the stars near the galactic center and clarify whether dark matter has any effect on the stars in that region.
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