Last year, the astronomical community received a surprising surprise. For the first time, the world collectively looked at the real image of the shadow of a black hole. It was the culmination of years of work, a glorious achievement in both human collaboration and technological ingenuity.
And, like the best scientific breakthrough, it opened up a whole new world of investigation. For a team led by astrophysicist Hector Ollivers of the University of Rhodeburg in the Netherlands and the University of Gothenburg in Germany, the investigation was: How can we? Learn Is M87 * a black hole?
“While the image is consistent with our expectations on what the black hole will look like, it’s important to make sure that what we see is really what we think,” Olivares told ScienceAlert.
“Like black holes, boson stars are predicted by general relativity and are able to grow into millions of solar masses and reach very compactness. The fact that they share these features with supermassive black holes suggests some authors. That supermassive compact objects located in the center of some galaxies could actually be boson stars. “
So, in a new paper, Olivares and his team have calculated what a boson star might look like in our telescopes, and how it might differ from a direct image of a black hole.
The Boson Stars are among the weird theoretical things out there. They are not like the traditional stars, except that they are a global part of the matter. But where stars are primarily made up of particles called fermions – protons, neutrons, electrons, the material that makes up the most significant parts of our universe – boson stars are made up entirely of … bosons.
These particles – including photons, gluons and the famous Higgs boson – do not follow physical laws like Fermi’s.
Fermius Pauli is subject to the exclusion principle, which means that you cannot have two identical particles occupying the same space. Bosons, however, can be superimposed; When they come together, they act like a large particle or object wave. We know this because it is done in a laboratory that produces what we call Bose-Einstein condensate.
In the case of boson stars, the particles can be squeezed into a space, the value of which can be described with specific values or points on the scale. Given the right kind of bosses in the right configuration, this ‘scalar field’ can come in a relatively stable configuration.
That’s the principle, at least. It’s not like anyone saw it in action. Let alone the bosons with the mass required for the formation of such a structure, let alone with a mass of supermassive black holes.
If we could identify the boson star, we could effectively detect these insidious particles.
“In order to form a structure as large as SMBH candidates, the boson mass must be very small (less than 10).-17 Electronvolts), ”Oliver said.
“Spin-0 bosons with equal or small masses appear in many cosmic models and string theories, and have been suggested as dark matter candidates under different names (scalar field dark matter, ultra-light action, fuzzy dark matter, quantum wave dark matter).” It will be extremely difficult to detect such imaginary particles, but observation of an object that looks like a boson star will indicate their existence. “
Boson stars do not fuse nuclei, and they do not emit any radiation. They just sat in space because they were invisible. Much like black holes.
Unlike black holes, however, boson stars will be transparent – they lack an absorbing surface that blocks photons, or they do not have a horizon of occurrence. Photons can escape boson stars, although their path can be slightly curved by gravity.
But some boson stars may be surrounded by a rotating ring of plasma – similar to an action disk around a black hole. And it will look exactly the same, like a glowing dessert with a dark region inside.
So, Olivares and his team simulated the dynamics of these plasma rings, and compared them to what we would expect to see in a black hole.
“The plasma configuration we use is not configured ‘by hand’ (under reasonable assumptions), but is achieved by simulation of plasma dynamics. This allows plasma to evolve over time and allows it to form structures like nature. Explained.
“This way we can associate the size of the radius with the radius of the boson star images (which mimic the shadow of a black hole) to work off the instability of the plasma. -Based on the properties of time – and it also allows predicting its size for other boson stars that we haven’t emulated. “
They found that the shadow of a boson star would be significantly smaller than the shadow of a black hole of the same mass. Thus, the team rejects M87 * as a boson star. The mass of the surrounding object is estimated by the speed of rotation of the gas around it, and is much larger than the mass produced by the boson star of that mass.
But the team also took into account the technical capabilities and limitations of the Event Horizon Telescope that gave the first image of a black hole; They set about deliberately imagining their results because they thought the boson stars were probably imagined by EHT.
This means that their results can be compared with future EHT observations, to determine if what we are looking for is actually a supermassive black hole.
If it weren’t for that, it would be a very big deal. This does not mean that supermassive black holes do not exist – the range of masses for black holes is too wide for boson stars. But it will signal that boson stars are real, and in turn have a huge impact on everything from the inflation of its early universe to the discovery of dark matter.
“This would mean that cosmological scalar fields exist and play an important role in the formation of structures in the universe,” Olivares told ScienceAlert.
“The growth of supermassive black holes is still not very well understood, and if it turns out that at least some of the candidates are actually boson stars, we need to think about the different formation methods involved in the scalar fields.”
The research was published in July Monthly instructions of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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