{"id":30157,"date":"2024-03-14T23:48:23","date_gmt":"2024-03-15T06:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blinkbargain.com\/blog\/these-violent-collisions-could-be-producing-dark-matter\/"},"modified":"2024-03-14T23:48:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T06:48:23","slug":"these-violent-collisions-could-be-producing-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/blinkbargain.com\/blog\/these-violent-collisions-could-be-producing-dark-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"These Violent Collisions Could Be Producing Dark Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

A collision of two extraordinarily dense, collapsed stars in the distant universe is providing potential clues to the axion, a dark matter candidate first proposed half a century ago.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Kara Swisher on All the Nonsense in the Tech Industry<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The stellar remnants are neutron stars, the corpses that remain after massive stars collapse in on themselves. These dead stars are so dense that their electrons collapse onto their protons\u2014hence, \u201cneutron star.\u201d Their extreme density also makes them a venue for exotic physics: specifically, they\u2019ve been proposed as a source of axions<\/a><\/span>, a hypothetical particle that could contribute to the universe\u2019s dark matter content.<\/p>\n

New research, published<\/a><\/span> earlier this month in Physical Review Letters, puts constraints on how axion-like particles might couple with photons, based on spectral and temporal data from a neutron star merger roughly 130 million light-years away. <\/p>\n

Axion-like particles (or ALPs) are a more general class of hypothetical dark matter candidates than axions, and scientists believe their nature could be revealed by studying photons and constraining the mass range of the particles. The axion-like particles produced in the neutron star merger escape the remnant and decay back into two photons, the team wrote in the paper, producing an electromagnetic signal detectable to telescopes. The data was collected from 2017 observations of the collision taken by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT). <\/p>\n

\u201cFor a neutron star merger, there\u2019s a unique opportunity where you could get the photon signal,\u201d said Bhupal Dev, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the study, in a phone call with Gizmodo. <\/em>\u201cWe could utilize this multimessenger study, this data, to probe some new physics beyond the Standard Model.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dark matter appears to constitute 27% of the universe<\/a><\/span>, but it interacts so weakly with ordinary matter that scientists can only detect it through its gravitational effects<\/a><\/span> on what we can<\/em> see. Popular dark matter candidates<\/a><\/span> (which is to say, theorized responsible parties for dark matter\u2019s apparent existence) are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), hidden (or dark) photons, massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), and, of course, axions.<\/p>\n

Named for a brand of laundry detergent, the axion is a hypothetical particle that was proposed in the 1970s as a solution to physics\u2019 strong-CP problem<\/a><\/span>, which describes the fact that quarks\u2019 adherence to the laws of physics remains the same, even when the particles are replaced with their mirror images.<\/p>\n

Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe, beaten only by black holes. Unlike black holes, light can escape neutron stars, making them observable on the electromagnetic spectrum.<\/p>\n

Dev explains that axions could arise from neutron star mergers in a couple of ways, if axions indeed couple to photons. Through photon coalescence, axions would emerge from photons coming together in the intensely hot astrophysical environment and fusing. The other way axions could arise is through the Primakoff process, in which a photon interacts with a bath of electrons, producing axions.<\/p>\n