Scientists suggest white dwarfs could help study dark matter

According to a study published in the preprint journal arXiv, a team of scientists suggests: Probing the interior of white dwarfs could be a good approach to better understand dark matter. Currently, scientists have used various methods to find answers to the issue, but they have not yet found much scientific evidence.

What is a white dwarf?

White dwarfs are the final stage in the evolution of stars, they are born when a star runs out of internal fuel.They are similar to hydrogen and do not support the continuation of their own internal reactions. They collapse due to other processes in their core, and the result is a white dwarf; a small, extremely dense star; It’s as if they squeezed the mass of the Sun into an Earth-sized object.

In the study, researchers explain that white dwarfs may be ‘perfect’ celestial bodies for studying dark matter. Because they are so dense, it is hypothesized that they could attract dark matter particle interactions, while high gravity would be responsible for ‘capturing’ these particles over time.. So they could possibly study the decay of dark matter inside white dwarfs.

“We have shown that the Milky Way’s white dwarfs are excellent targets for detecting dark matter (DM). Using gamma-ray data obtained from the galactic center by Fermi and HESS, we investigate the sensitivity to dark matter annihilation occurring in white dwarfs, which can lead to long-lived intermediaries or resulting in enhanced intermediaries that produce detectable gamma rays.

White dwarf and dark matter

To understand the hypothesis, the authors of the article Simple white dwarf model consisting of carbon-12, taking into account dark matter accretion “for a three-particle model of light, medium and heavy mass”. So they made calculations of the interaction between dark matter and the nucleons of the white dwarf’s ordinary matter.

It is important to emphasize that the paper is a theory, so the authors did not examine the decay of dark matter inside white dwarfs. However, stars in this category, in globular clusters close to or not far from the center of our galaxy, They may be the best candidates for a study focusing on dark matter.

“Previous studies on dark matter in white dwarfs have generally focused on dark matter heating of white dwarfs in globular clusters such as Messier 4, where the dark matter content is not well understood. “Instead, we focus on the white dwarf population in the galactic center of the Milky Way, where a significant dark matter signal may emerge even for a range of dark matter density distributions.”

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