This Star Might be Orbiting a Strange 'Boson Star' -by PaulMattSutter
that this particular setup is highly unusual. Black holes form from the deaths of very massive stars, and it’s unlikely for a star like our sun to form as part of a binary pair with such a massive star. The scenario requires so much fine tuning, the authors argue, that we should be open to considering other possibilities.
Perhaps the most exotic possibility is that the dark companion is not a black hole but a boson star. Boson stars are a consequence of a hypothetical form of dark matter. Dark matter itself comprises over 80% of all the mass of every galaxy and is made of some kind of particle that so far eludes modern physics. In some theories of dark matter it is composed of bosons, which are a kind of particle like photons and gluons – particles that typically carry the forces of nature.
While it’s highly unlikely that this observation has revealed the existence of a boson star, the idea is worth considering for two reasons. One, the star is definitely orbiting something small, dense, and compact. This offers a natural test bed for our understanding of gravity as given by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Finding any sort of discrepancy between theoretical expectations and observational results would be a landmark discovery.
Second, we can use this as a case study in the nature of boson stars. We can further investigate the properties of these exotic and hypothetical objects, and use this scenario to test those ideas. While it’s unlikely that those tests will come out in favor of the existence of boson stars, the more we learn about dark matter, even if it’s just a slow process of ruling out interesting ideas, the better.
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