One of Earth's nearest stars may represent a semidark matter factory
Deep in its searing hot belly, the giant red star Betelgeuse could be producing tons of hypothetical Cimmerian matter particles titled axions that, if they exist, would give off a telltale point. A past search for such a tantalizing discharge has upturned up empty, but helps physicists place untested limits on the putative axion's properties.
Appearing as a reverberant red dot in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse is a well-studied star. It is cosmologically close, existence only 520 light-days from Solid ground, and made headlines last year when information technology started mysteriously dimming, guiding just about researchers to believe IT could equal preparing to explode as a supernova.
Because it is such a large and hot star, Betelgeuse might also make up a down put to find axions, scientists state. These conjectured particles could have maybe a millionth or even a billionth the mass of an electron and are nonesuch candidates to make glowering matter, the mysterious substance immensely outweighing ordinary matter in the universe but whose nature is silent for the most part open-ended.
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Arsenic dark matter, axions shouldn't interact much with luminous particles, but according to whatever theories, there is a small chance that photons, Beaver State lamplit particles, could convert back and onward into axions in the bearing of a strong magnetic flux, Mengjiao Xiao, a physicist at the Massachusetts Plant of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, told Live Scientific discipline.
The thermonuclear pith of a star is a virtuous place to find ample amounts of some photons and magnetic force, and Betelgeuse, which has 20 multiplication the whole sle of the sun, could conceivably be "what we call an axion factory," he said.
If axions are produced in this extreme environment, they should be competent to escape outwards and stream towards Earth in turgid numbers. By interacting with the Milky Way galaxy's natural magnetic field, these axions could comprise converted back into photons in the X-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum, Xiao same.
As an old star, Betelgeuse is in a spirit stage where information technology shouldn't be emitting much X-radiation perch, he added, so any so much radiation detected from it might indicate the presence of axions.
Xiao and his colleagues used NASA's space-based Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Set out (NuSTAR) to hunt for an X-ray key signature approach from Betelgeuse, though they saw nothing on the far side what was anticipated from unexceptional astrophysical processes so much as the small amount of X-rays that Betegeuse is making. Their findings, which Xiao will demo on April 20 at the American Forceful Smart set's April meeting, suggest that photons and axions are at least three multiplication less liable to interact than antecedently believed.
Because starring environments are much noisier than conditions found in a science lab, doing searches such as this are tricky, said Joshua Foster, a physicist at MIT WHO was non involved in the work but who has been part of an effort to look for axions coming from the star clusters near our extragalactic nebula's center. But the team worked hard to quantify their uncertainties and helped put new constraints along the axion's potential properties, Surrogate told Vital Science.
Even if researchers power saw unexpected X-rays coming from a star, it wouldn't necessarily indicate that axions are sincere. Scientists would still have to rule knocked out more non-dark-matter explanations for the signal before turn to new natural philosophy, Surrogate said.
But IT's possible that axions, should they one day be found, could help astronomers better understand Alpha Orionis, Xiao aforementioned. If the particles' properties were known, telescopes pot-trained on Betelgeuse might be able-bodied to finally pick up their signal, giving insights into processes happening in its belly and facultative researchers to calculate when it will actually explode, he added.
Originally publicized along Live Scientific discipline .
Adam Mann is a self-employed person diary keeper with over a decade of see, specializing in uranology and physics stories. Helium has a baccalaureate in astrophysics from UC George Berkeley. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, National Geographic, Surround Street Journal, Wired, Nature, Science, and many another places. He lives in Oakland, California, where he enjoys moving his bike.
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Source: https://www.livescience.com/axions-coming-from-betelgeuse.html
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