by Charles Mudede • Mar 5, 2021 at 10:00 am
Shall we shake the universe? brightstars/gettyimages.com
In the previous decade, there were only two major events in the science of physics. One was the detection of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. (The particle was needed to explain why particles have mass.) The other big event occurred in our very own (radioactive) backyard, at Hanford s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).
This mean machine (lasers, vacuums, mirrors), along with another one in the woods of Louisiana, can transform into sound the gravitational waves predicted in a mathematical model Albert Einstein formulated a decade after his special relativity. The cosmic ear of LIGO heard this small ripple across the medium of spacetime as a chirp in 2016.
Eerie Stars of Dark Matter May Be Behind Largest Gravitational Wave Detection Yet
2 MARCH 2021
On 21 May 2019, from a distance of 7 billion light-years away, our gravitational wave detectors were rocked by the most massive collision yet. From analysis of the signal, astronomers concluded that the detection was the result of two black holes smashing together, weighing in at 66 and 85 times the mass of the Sun respectively.
But what if it was something else? A new study offers a different interpretation of the event. It s possible, according to an international team of astrophysicists, that the two objects were not black holes at all, but mysterious, theoretical objects called boson stars - potentially made up of elusive candidates for dark matter.
Scientists working at the frontier of particle physics are proposing the existence of a theoretical exotic, ultra-light “boson star” with a mass billions of times smaller than that of the electron and thinking about seeking a ‘darker’ origin of the ripples in spacetime, at the same time proving the existence of a dark-matter particle. Theories about the origin of dark matter in the universe –one of the biggest questions in science–vary from suggesting that it may be older than the Big Bang to the existence of particles the size of galaxies.
Beyond the Standard Model
The question of what particles make up dark matter –“dark” in the sense that it doesn’t emit radiation or hardly physically interact with anything except through its gravitational attraction –is a crucial one for modern particle physics. Observations indicate that dark matter exists, but apparently something other than the particles in the Standard Model constitutes it.
Merger of Two Boson Stars Could Explain Existence of Dark Matter
Written by AZoQuantumFeb 25 2021
An international research team has now demonstrated that the heaviest collision of black holes to be ever visualized and created by the gravitational-wave GW190521 could be more mysterious than previously believed that is, the merger of a pair of boson stars.
Illustration of a merger of two boson stars. Image Credit: Nicolás Sanchis-Gual y Rocío García Souto.
The new study would be the first proof of the presence of these theoretical objects that represent one of the key candidates to create dark matter, which constitutes 27% of the Universe.
Nicolás Sanchis-Gual and Rocío García-Souto
The hypothetical stars are among the simplest exotic compact objects proposed and constitute well founded dark matter candidates. Within this interpretation, the team is able to estimate the mass of a new particle constituent of these stars, an ultra-light boson with a mass billions of times smaller than that of the electron. Their analysis has been published in the journal
Physical Review Letters on 24 February 2021.
The team is co-led by Dr. Juan Calderón Bustillo, a former professor from the Department of Physics at CUHK and now “La Caixa Junior Leader – Marie Curie Fellow”, at the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics, and Dr. Nicolás Sanchis-Gual, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aveiro and at the Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon). Other collaborators came from the University of Valencia, the University of Aveiro and Monash University. Samson Hin Wai Leong, a second-year undergra