The large, red star Betelgeuse, deep in its hot hot belly, can produce tons of hypothetical particles of dark matter, called actions that, if they exist, can give a sign. A recent search for such a disturbing emission has become empty, but helps physicists place new limits on the properties of the alleged action.
Betelgeuse appears as a bright red spot in the constellation Orion and is a well-studied star. It is cosmologically close, only 520 light years from here Earth, and made headlines last year when it mysteriously began to fade, and some researchers believed it was preparing to explode as a supernova.
Because it’s such a big and hot star, Betelgeuse could also be a perfect place to find action, scientists say. These putative particles may have a millionth or even a billionth mass of an electron and are the ideal candidates to make up dark matter, the mysterious substance that weighs heavier than ordinary matter in the universe, but whose nature is still largely indeterminate.
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As dark matter, actions should not communicate much with light particles, but according to some theories, there is a small probability that photons, or light particles, can switch back and forth in actions in the presence of a strong magnetic field, Mengjiao Xiao. , a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, told Live Science.
The term core of a star is a good place to store large amounts of photons and magnetism, and Betelgeuse, which has 20 times the mass of the sun, is possibly ‘what we call an action factory’, he said.
If actions are produced in this extreme environment, they must be able to escape outside and flow to the earth in large numbers. By interacting with the natural magnetic field of the Milky Way, these actions can be converted back into photons in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, Xiao said.
As an elderly star, Betelgeuse is in a life phase where it should not emit much X-rays, he added, and such radiation detected from it could be an indication of actions.
Xiao and his colleagues used NASA’s space-based Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) to search for an X-ray signature derived from Betelgeuse, although they see nothing expected of ordinary astrophysical processes such as the small amount X-rays that make Betegeuse. Their findings, which Xiao on April 20 at the American Physical Society April Meeting, suggests that photons and actions are at least three times less likely to interact than previously thought.
Because stellar environments are very noisy as conditions in a laboratory, it is difficult to do searches like this, said Joshua Foster, a physicist from MIT, who was not involved in the work but who was part of the effort to to seek actions. come out of the star clusters near the center of our galaxy. But the team worked hard to quantify their uncertainties and help place new constraints on the potential features of the action, Foster told WordsSideKick.
Even if researchers saw unexpected X-rays of a star, it would not necessarily indicate that actions are real. Scientists will still have to exclude many non-dark explanations for the signal before moving on to new physics, Foster said.
But it is possible that actions, should one day be found, could help astronomers better understand Betelgeuse, Xiao said. If the properties of the particles were known, telescopes trained by Betelgeuse could eventually pick up their signal, giving insights into processes happening in the abdomen and enabling researchers to calculate when it will actually explode, he said. added.
Originally published on Live Science.