(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
All things are doomed to grow old and die, including the stars. However, researchers recently discovered that some stars have seemingly found the fountain of youth to become immortals.
Immortal S-Cluster Stars in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way
Like everything else in the cosmos, stars eventually die. Stars of all sizes collapse under their own gravity when they run out of the fuel required for nuclear fusion at their cores, dying to become a dense cosmic remnant like a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. In about 5 billion years, our star, the sun, will suffer from this fate. It will first expand as a red giant and destroy the inner planets, including Earth. This phase will also finish after around a billion years, leaving the sun's core as a white dwarf ember encircled by a cloud of cosmic ashes in the form of cooling star material.
However, in a new study, researchers created the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, representing star life, death, and afterlife. They made an astonishing discovery: the mysterious S-cluster stars at the center of our galaxy appear to have discovered a means of eternal existence.
Their simulations demonstrate that stars can exist solely on dark matter as fuel, and because there is an abundance of dark matter close to the Galactic Center, these stars become eternal, according to team leader Isabelle John of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. This is quite intriguing since our simulations provide results consistent with observations of S-cluster stars: dark matter is a fuel to keep them young indefinitely.
The concept of everlasting stars can explain many of the peculiar characteristics of the S-cluster stars. The extraordinarily high quantity of seemingly youthful stars at the Galactic Center is likely due to stars becoming immortal because of the enormous density of dark matter. For the same reason, there aren't many older stars in the region.
John said the environment in the Milky Way's Galactic Center is considerably harsher than where we are in the galaxy. The so-called "S-cluster stars," the stars nearest the Galactic Center, are extremely mysterious. They exhibit several unique characteristics. For instance, it remains to be seen how they arrived near the center, where the surroundings are believed to be somewhat hostile to star formation.
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Dark Matter Building Up Inside Dead Stars
In another study published in 2023, researchers said dark matter may be involved in star explosions. Although it is entirely undetectable to observers, dark matter is assumed to be present throughout the cosmos.
Researchers may be able to observe the subtle effects of dark matter as it seeps into dead stars' cores and changes their behavior. Invisible dark matter may accumulate in the incredibly dense interiors of neutron stars, which could lead to catastrophic explosions.
Depending on what dark matter is composed of and how it interacts with regular matter, the researchers investigated the range of impacts it can have deep within neutron stars. For instance, interactions between dark matter particles may sometimes destroy and release a small quantity of energy. The enormous concentrations of dark matter inside neutron stars mean that this would only very seldom occur, but if it did, the heat released might change the internal dynamics of those dead stars.
Neutron stars can be heated simply by the buildup of dark matter, provided that they collide with ordinary matter particles en route. In the most extreme scenario, a neutron star might experience a "superburst, a runaway nuclear chain reaction that detonates the star by a dark energy particle, depositing the proper amount of energy into the star.
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