This would in turn result in a short-lived hot spot that could be detected using telescopes that can examine the UV spectrum. Similarly, Zhou and his colleagues predicted that the shock waves produced by dark asteroids deep inside a star could reach a star's surface. "Finally, we realized that the shock waves generated by the dark asteroid's travel through the star were the most promising signature."
"We had a hunch that the energy produced by such a collision should be visible somehow, so we brainstormed for a few months, trying and tossing out idea after idea," Zhou explained. After a few weeks of calculations and discussions, however, the team realized that the impact between a dark matter asteroid and an ordinary star would most likely not lead to an explosion, as ordinary stars are more stable than white dwarfs. This hypothesis was based on past studies suggesting that energy deposition can sometimes trigger supernova in white dwarfs. Initially, Zhou and his colleagues started exploring the possibility that the heat produced during the impact between a dark matter asteroid and an ordinary star could result in the star exploding. "We were interested in the intermediate case of asteroid-sized dark matter, which had been thought to be hard to test experimentally, since dark asteroids would be too rare to impact Earth, but too small to see in space." "Most experiments have searched for dark matter made of separate particles, each about as heavy as an atomic nucleus, or clumps about as massive as planets or stars," Kevin Zhou, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told.
These waves could in turn lead to distinctive and transient optical, UV and X-ray emissions that might be detectable by sophisticated telescopes. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that when macroscopic dark matter travels through a star, it could produce shock waves that might reach the star's surface. Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Université Paris Saclay have recently carried out a theoretical study that could introduce a new way of searching for dark matter. This means that dark matter searches are based on great part on hypotheses and theoretical assumptions. One factor that makes searching for dark matter particularly challenging is that very little is known about its possible mass and composition.
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