Astronomers discovered it about 20 years ago, and our best current instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope, has confirmed that newborn stars are orbiting in the immediate vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
We don't know everything about the galactic center, but it's certainly not a simple neighborhood. There are several anomalies here: fewer late-stage stars, an unusually high proportion of massive stars, and unusually high orbital velocities of stars within the region.
The Sun may be about 4.6 billion years old, and the Milky Way itself is 13.6 billion years old – meanwhile, there are stars in the center that appear to be 100,000 years old. They can't come from anywhere else, because they're too young for that. It is also unlikely that they were born here, because due to the strong radiation and gravitational influence of the galactic center, it is a particularly unsuitable environment for the formation of new stars.
A streak of starlight revealed more advanced stars, suggesting that they only appeared young, but were not, but had been rejuvenated and immortalized by a mysterious external influence.
Astronomers from Stockholm University and Stanford University have built a model that can explain what's happening. According to the scientists, we're seeing the influence of dark matter.
Cosmic wrinkle removal
Unusually young stars are important because stellar evolution is a well-described and reliable scientific field.
Stars burn hydrogen during nuclear fusion. A balance develops between the resulting outward pressure and inward gravity, resulting in the stars being stable.
– explains Isabelle John, a doctoral candidate at Stockholm University.
As hydrogen is depleted, other elements inside the star also enter the fusion process, changing the aforementioned balance and composition of the star. At a certain point, fusion no longer provides energy and gravity wins out, in which case a star explosion occurs, but according to newer theories, it also happens that the star simply turns into a black hole.
However, what happens in the middle of the Milky Way is like constantly pouring lighter fluid onto the embers left after lighting a fire.
Our simulations show that when a star attracts a large amount of dark matter that destroys its interior, it produces an outward pressure similar to fusion. The main difference is that the star uses up all the hydrogen and dies. On the other hand, a star can continuously accumulate dark matter
John says.
This not only happens, but requires the availability of dark matter in sufficient density. The center of the galaxy happens to be the place where there is a lot of dark matter.
The questionable point of the theory, and also one of the biggest scientific questions of our time, is what dark matter is. It is currently assumed that the disintegration of galaxies is prevented by the gravity of dark matter. It makes up 80% of the matter in the universe, however
It is invisible and does not interact with other matter.
Until we know what it is, we call it dark matter.
There are several ideas for solving the dark matter problem. Something solves the question without dark matter by complementing and correcting the basic physical laws of cosmology. But there are also those who say that dark matter is actually antimatter, or consists of particles that have not yet been discovered, called WIMPs, or axions, which are also only theoretical, or neutrinos, which are certainly not only theoretical.
In the researchers' simulations, things fell into place when dark matter formed from weakly interacting heavy elementary particles, called WIMPs.
According to independent experts, the combustion mixture that animates the cosmic campfire in the case of the Milky Way could easily be not dark matter, but matter flowing toward the black hole at the center, i.e. a significant amount. of hydrogen. In the near future, observations from the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii will determine exactly which is which.
(Futurism, Live sciences, Science Alert)
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