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| Image Source (and sound): Dark Matter Sound System - Band Camp |
Topics: Black Holes, Dark Matter, General Relativity, Heliophysics, Humor, Quantum Cosmology
First of all, from the astrophysics classes I've taken, accretion is attributed to stars diffusing material around it, usually to create things like planets. This is a novel way to look at the pursuit of dark matter and I found the paper intriguing.
What teachers will hate me for: since everyone knows what a black hole looks like, and it really didn't coincide with the paper (abstract below), I did find a techno metal group that has a whole unique take on combining the two subjects (link below above image). As always, I get no gratuities for sharing this, but hopefully like me, it makes you grin for many of you, the first day of school (at least in Texas). Think of it as your "hook," but don't dwell on it very long...the students will catch on you're enjoying it too much.
Abstract
Searches for dark matter imprints are one of the most active areas of current research. We focus here on light fields with mass mB, such as axions and axion-like candidates. Using perturbative techniques and full-blown nonlinear Numerical Relativity methods, we show that (i) dark matter can pile up in the center of stars, leading to configurations and geometries oscillating with frequency which is a multiple of f=2.51014 mBc2/eV Hz. These configurations are stable throughout most of the parameter space, and arise out of credible mechanisms for dark-matter capture. Stars with bosonic cores may also develop in other theories with effective mass couplings, such as (massless) scalar-tensor theories. We also show that (ii) collapse of the host star to a black hole is avoided by efficient gravitational cooling mechanisms.
Physics arXiv: Accretion of dark matter by stars
Richard Brito, Vitor Cardoso, Hirotada Okawa
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