A cluster of stars orbiting the turbulent center of the Milky Way could become “immortal bodies” by continuously capturing and destroying bits of dark matter in their cores, a new research suggests.
Using computer models of stellar evolution, researchers found that dark matter The particles captured by the gravity of these stars can repeatedly collide and “annihilate” each other within the star, transforming into ordinary particles while releasing large amounts of energy. strong.
This additional energy source could maintain the star’s stability and possibly allow it to survive, even after the normal supply of nuclear fuel dries up, the researchers suggest.
“Stars burn hydrogen inside nuclear fusion,” lead study author Isabella John, a doctoral candidate in astroparticle physics at Stockholm University, told Live Science via email. “The outward pressure from this balances the inward force from the forces of gravity, keeping the stars in a stable equilibrium.”
However, it appears that most stars are visible near the central black hole of the Milky Way. far less than the theory of astrological alignment. To investigate this mystery, the researchers investigated whether stars can draw energy from the vast supply of dark matter thought to exist in the galactic center.
“Our experiments show that if the star can collect a lot of dark matter, which is destroyed inside the star, it can produce a similar mass outside, which stabilizes the star due to destruction dark matter instead of nuclear fusion – so stars can use dark matter as fuel instead of hydrogen,” John said. “The key difference is that stars use up their hydrogen, which will eventually die. On the other hand, stars can collect dark matter all the time.”
The study, published in the arXiv preprint server in May, there was no peer review.
Star defies belief
Stellar Evolution is a well-studied subject. The relationships between a star’s age, luminosity, size and temperature were derived with high accuracy both from theory and from astronomical data. However, the latest information shows that the properties of the stars are close to the middle of the Milky Way against the traditional theory of stellar evolution.
Target: Information-defying babies are ‘swirling like peas’ near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole
“The innermost stars of our Galaxy, the S-cluster stars, exhibit a series of properties [are] not found anywhere else: It is not clear how they got so close to the center, where the environment is considered to be the most resistant to star formation,” said John. star rose from there from somewhere else. Also, there seem to be a lot of heavy stars all of a sudden.”
These unusual properties of S-cluster stars can be explained by the presence of an additional source of internal energy. For example, this extra energy would allow the star to burn hydrogen – the natural energy source – at a lower rate, creating aging slowly and looking younger than you really are.
In their recent study, John, along with Tim Linden the University of Stockholm and Rebecca K. Lane the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, suggested that this source could be the destruction of dark matter. This explanation corresponds to the fact that more dark matter is believed to be hiding in the center of the galaxy, exactly where the oddball stars were observed.
“In most of the Milky Way, the mass of dark matter is not high enough to affect the stars,” John said. “But in the Galactic Center, the amount of dark matter is very high, maybe several billion times higher than the earth.”
Special destruction
To test their idea, the researchers made a computer model of the life cycle of a star surrounded by a dark cloud with the same weight as the galactic center. They hypothesized that dark matter consists of weakly interacting large particles, one of the main candidates for dark matter particles.
Because dark matter particles have not been found in laboratory studies, it is not known how strongly they interact with ordinary matter and how quickly they annihilate each other. But the study showed that for some important values of these quantities, the use of dark matter energy production explained well what was observed of S-cluster stars.
However, to confirm their statement, the authors believe that more stars are needed to be found near the galactic center. In addition, measurements of known stars should be performed in order to reliably compare observations with empirical predictions. Hopefully, such information will be possible in the near future using the Large Telescope in Chile or the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers said.
“More accurate observations of S-cluster stars will give us more information about these stars and their ongoing processes,” John said. “This will show whether the information matches our model, or if other explanations of their unusual properties are better.”
#Immortal #stars #center #Milky #infinite #energy #source #study #suggests