Stars can capture dark matter, and serve as safe harbours for dark matter clumps to grow. Large dark matter cores inside stars can, in turn, cause the star to emit radio waves, providing a unique signature of dark matter.
This is the conclusion of a result published in Physical Review D, and highlighted by its editors for its oringinality, clarity and inter-disciplinarity. The study was conducted by Richard Brito, Vitor Cardoso and Caio Macedo from CENTRA, jointly with Hirotada Okawa, a former researcher at CENTRA now at Kyoto University and Waseda University, and Carlos Palenzuela from the Universitat de les Illes Balears.
Expanding on a recent article published in Physical Review Letters, they used Einstein's equation to understand rigorously how dark matter cores form, interact and grow inside stars. In this work they showed that stable dark matter cores can form and might lead to distinct signatures in the oscillations of the star's material. The study also dispells a myth that dark matter causes the death of their parent stars.
The article was selected as an Editors’ Suggestion. Physical Review Editors suggest a small fraction of articles with the aim of promoting particularly important and interesting research.More information can be found here:
http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.044045
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.111301