At the center of the galaxy, there is a star that has absorbed dark matter and become 'immortal.'
Just like humans, stars also have a lifespan, eventually burning out or exploding. However, research has shown that at the center of the galaxy, there exists a star that has become immortal by obtaining energy from the annihilation of dark matter, just like the ambition of the final boss of a video game.
[2405.12267] Dark Branches of Immortal Stars at the Galactic Center
Dark matter could make our galaxy's innermost stars immortal
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-dark-galaxy-innermost-stars-immortal.html
'Immortal stars' could feast on dark matter in the Milky Way's heart | Space
https://www.space.com/immortal-stars-dark-matter-milky-way
Stars like our sun that shine using the energy of nuclear fusion are called main sequence stars , but when they run out of hydrogen fuel, they reach the end of their lives. How they die depends on their mass, and most of them end up as cinders like white dwarf stars, or as supernovae, becoming dense objects like neutron stars or black holes.
'The stars closest to the galactic center, the so-called 'S-cluster' stars, are very puzzling and have properties that are not found anywhere else. For example, it is not clear how these stars got so close to the galactic center, where the conditions are so harsh for stars to be born,' said Isabel John, an astrophysicist at Stockholm University in Sweden.
In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper published on the preprint server arXiv in May 2024, John and his team used a computer model of stellar evolution to study how the stars in the S cluster would evolve if they absorbed dark matter or not.
As a result, it was found that when a massive star ingests dark matter, the nuclear fusion reaction slows down and the growth of the star slows down. It was also found that when the density of dark matter is high, the dark matter is burned instead of nuclear fusion, and the aging of the star stops. In other words, it is possible for a star to ingest dark matter instead of using it as fuel for nuclear fusion and use it as an energy source.
It is believed that dark matter is more densely present in the center of the galaxy than in its outer edges, and by burning this virtually endless supply of dark matter, S-cluster stars could become nearly immortal stars that never run out of fuel.
'Our simulations show that stars can survive fueled exclusively by dark matter,' said John. 'And because there is so much dark matter near the center of the galaxy, these stars are immortal and forever young, occupying a distinct and observable new region on the stellar evolution
In their paper, the team calls this group of stars that deviate from the standard stellar evolution model, such as main sequence stars, the 'Dark Main Sequence.'
The reason dark matter is called dark matter in the first place is because it is invisible and does not interact with normal matter, making it unobservable. However, dark matter may interact with other dark matter particles.
The research team believes that if dark matter also has particles and antiparticles, just as normal matter has its counterpart, then when they collide and annihilate, a huge amount of energy is released, allowing dark main sequence stars to use this as an energy source in place of nuclear fusion and continue to emit light.
The model presented in this study answers many questions about the S-cluster stars in one fell swoop. For example, as John said, the center of the galaxy is a place where stars are hard to form, but the stars there are very young and unlikely to have migrated all the way from there to the center after being born somewhere else.
However, if these stars are immortalized by dark matter, it would explain the 'paradox of youth' - the unusually young stars at the center of the galaxy, the 'conundrum of old age' - the rarefaction of old stars, and the bias towards more massive stars near the center of the galaxy.
So far, only a handful of stars have been identified as being in the galaxy's center because it is so bright that it makes star discovery difficult.
The Thirty Meter Telescope , which will soon begin operation, will be able to observe these regions more clearly than ever before, and the research team hopes that future research will enable them to confirm the existence of dark main sequence stars and shed light on the mystery of dark matter.
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