![]() Finding any sort of discrepancy between theoretical expectations and observational results would be a landmark discovery. This offers a natural test bed for our understanding of gravity as given by Einstein's general theory of relativity. One, the star is definitely orbiting something small, dense, and compact. While it's highly unlikely that this observation has revealed the existence of a boson star, the idea is worth considering for two reasons. These objects would not emit any radiation at all and would appear to outside observers to act like black holes. But the dark matter bosons would be different, and would instead simply fill up most of the universe.īut because of their nature, the boson dark matter particles could easily pile up on themselves forming dense, compact objects. In some theories of dark matter it is composed of bosons, which are a kind of particle like photons and gluons-particles that typically carry the forces of nature. Dark matter itself comprises over 80% of all the mass of every galaxy and is made of some kind of particle that so far eludes modern physics. Boson stars are a consequence of a hypothetical form of dark matter. Perhaps the most exotic possibility is that the dark companion is not a black hole but a boson star. The scenario requires so much fine tuning, the authors argue, that we should be open to considering other possibilities. Black holes form from the deaths of very massive stars, and it's unlikely for a star like our sun to form as part of a binary pair with such a massive star. Most astronomers suspect that it was a black hole, which could easily explain the observational result.īut, in a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers have pointed out that this particular setup is highly unusual. However, its companion did not emit any radiation at all. The star itself was fairly typical, weighing in at 0.93 solar masses and with roughly the same chemical abundance as our own sun. For example, one star in particular was seen orbiting a dark companion. ![]() While almost all of those stars behaved as expected, there were some surprises. The Gaia survey, led by the European Space Agency, provided detailed maps of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
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