In a distant star system, a sunlike star orbits an invisible object that may be the first example of a 'boson star' made of dark matter, new research suggests.
Astronomers long thought that a peculiar star system observed by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite was a simple case of a star orbiting a black hole. But now, two astronomers are challenging that claim, finding that the evidence suggests something far stranger: possibly, a never-before-seen type of star made of invisible dark matter. Their research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was published April 18 on the preprint server arXiv.
So perhaps that dark orbital companion is something much more exotic, as researchers propose in the new study. Maybe, they suggest, it's a clump of dark matter particles. One of these models hypothesizes that dark matter is a new kind of boson. Bosons are the particles that carry the forces of nature; for example, a photon is a boson that carries the electromagnetic force. While we know of only a limited set of bosons in the Standard Model of particle physics, there's nothing, in principle, stopping the universe from having many more kinds.
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