Axions—a popular dark matter candidate—may be floating around dense stellar remnants in a haze, and even be detectable to some telescopes.
A hypothetical particle that could make up the universe’s dark matter may be produced by and hang around neutron stars, some of the densest objects in the universe, according to a team of physicists., the enigmatic stuff that makes up over a quarter of the universe’s matter. A team of researchers from the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton, and Oxford now posit that axions could form clouds around neutron stars, which are the.
Some neutron stars can be among the most magnetic objects in the universe, and therefore are given a special label:. This extremely magnetized environment is fertile breeding grounds for axions’ conversion into light, Prabhu said, which then could be detectable by space-based telescopes.in the universe that scientists cannot directly observe because it does not emit light and only appears to interact with ordinary matter through gravitational interactions.
“These axions accumulate over astrophysical timescales, thereby forming a dense ‘axion cloud’ around the star,” the team wrote in the paper. “While a deeper understanding of the systematic uncertainties in these systems is required, our current estimates suggest that existing radio telescopes could improve sensitivity to the axion-photon coupling by more than an order of magnitude.”
“Axions are one of our best bets for new physics,” Safdi said, though they are “notoriously difficult to probe given their feeble interactions with ordinary matter.”
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Astronomers spot a possible 'future Earth' — 8 billion years into its futureBen Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
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