2023-08-04 16:16:00
Scientists have discovered a gigantic, bright and peculiar star that could be showing a dark matter clump to our telescopes. The results of the studies intrigued astronomers, since the star is so far away that it shouldn’t even be visible, considering our current technology.
Called “Mothra”, the system is located about 10.4 billion light-years from Earth, and apparently consists of two stars. One is a red supergiant with “only” 50,000 times the Sun’s luminosity, and the other, even brighter, is a blue supergiant with 125,000 times the luminosity of our star.
Its exceptional luminosity has led the research community to believe that the star may be a rare “kaiju” star – a category that describes giant, distant stars with an apparent brightness more intense than normal. It is in this class that Godzilla is found, one of the brightest stars ever discovered.
Despite the differences between the supergiants in the Mothra system, scientists say they both have intriguing similarities that could hint at the existence of dark matter clumps in space between us and them.
José Diego, an astrophysicist and research team leader at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain, points out that the findings could help “set constraints on dark matter,” helping to trace what these mysterious particles are.
To study the binary system located billions of light-years away, the team analyzed data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope which, despite its incredible astronomical observation power, still has limitations to distinguish very distant individual stars. With that, astronomers also turned to Hubble data.
Mothra is in a region magnified by the effect of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that allows you to see more distant objects in much more detail due to the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies. With this, the stars themselves can serve as “magnifying glasses”.
What caught the attention of scientists is the magnification of the stars. The magnifying glass generated by the galaxies between us and the binary system could not have caused such distortion in space-time. This suggests that there is something closer to the star that provides an additional “zoom”.
This “something”, which does not appear in the observations of James Webb and Hubble, would have between 10,000 and 2.5 million times the mass of the Sun. Scientists theorize that it could be a dwarf galaxy almost entirely composed of dark matter.
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“The existence of these tiny lenses is fully consistent with the expectations of the standard cold dark matter model,” said Diego. “On the other hand, the existence of such a small substructure in an environment full of clusters has implications for other models of dark matter.”
The astrophysicist refers to the possibility of refuting theories linked to dark matter, such as hot dark matter and axionic dark matter — at least in a specific mass range. In any case, we know that the relative weight of these particles in the composition of the cosmos is much greater than that of conventional matter.
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