Boson Clouds Could Solve the Mystery of Dark Matter

The scientific search for gravitational waves rippling through space and time seems to have dragged boson clouds into the net. What some experts spotted is being kicked around as a “leading contender” theory to explain dark matter. Astrophysicists will be quick to tell you they don’t have all the answers. One of the things that confuses astronomers and physicists alike is the elusive stuff they call “dark matter.” The word “aether” went out of fashion but both terms mean about the same thing, “freaky stuff that holds the universe together.”

Potential boson clouds

A team of physicists have been working with powerful instruments like the cutting edge Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, called LIGO for short.

They also get to play with it’s advanced cousins Virgo, and KAGRA. With all the ultra-highest-tech hardware, they “detect gravitational waves up to billions of light-years away.” What they’re hoping to find are “potential boson clouds.”

Because they’re made up of “ultralight subatomic particles,” boson clouds are almost impossible to detect. Even so, they’ve been “suggested as a possible source of dark matter.”

The guys who get paid to explain these things get upset when they can’t come up with an answer for what 85 percent of all matter in the Universe is.

The collaboration of international researchers loosely herded by The Australian National University “offers one of the best leads yet to hunt down these subatomic particles by searching for gravitational waves caused by boson clouds circling black holes.”

There was a time when black holes existed only on paper, now we lump them into categories by the way they behave. We even have a reasonably tame one in our Milky Way’s galactic center.

First all-sky survey

In order to do it right, the astronomers can’t just pick a spot in the sky willy-nilly and keep their fingers crossed. AS ANU Gravitational Astrophysicist Dr. Lilli Sun explains, you have to do it systematically and look everywhere. She’s thrilled that they just completed “the first all-sky survey in the world tailored to look for predicted gravitational waves coming from possible boson clouds near rapidly spinning black holes.”

They “believe these black holes trap a huge number of boson particles in their powerful gravity field, creating a cloud co-rotating with them.” They think that could be what “keeps generating gravitational waves that hurtle through space.”

The biggest problem is that boson particles “rarely interact with other matter.” That’s what makes them look suspiciously like the dark matter they’ve been pursuing for decades.

“Dark matter is material that cannot be seen directly, but we know that dark matter exists because of the effect it has on objects that we can observe.”

Part of the trick is knowing where to look. By “searching for gravitational waves emitted by these clouds we may be able to track down these elusive boson particles and possibly crack the code of dark matter.”

If not, they can throw another theory in the trash can. “Our searches could also allow us to rule out certain ultralight boson particles that our theories say could exist but actually don’t.”