Black Matter Detonators For White Dwarf Supernovae

When a white dwarf steals enough matter from its stellar partner it explodes as a supernova. But what starts the explosion itself. Computer models do not tell us. But two physicists from Canada think that white dwarves have a detonator with a tiny black hole that gets created inside the white dwarf by the collapse of dark matter.

Image by skeeze from Pixabay

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When a white dwarf orbits in close proximity to a suitable stellar partner – usually a red giant it just shamelessly steal matter from it. Once the mass of the thief reaches the Chandrasekhar's limit – usually roughly from 1.44 to 2.58 Sun masses the dwarf warms up and starts to “whirl”. After some time it ignites with a deflagrationary – or a subsonically spreading – flame that at a certain moment turns into a supersonic detonation. This fires off an Ia type supernova. Astronomers love those as those work as standard candles for observing deep space.

As Ashley Pagnotta from the College of Charleston recently said to the New Scientists journal one of the dark secrets of current astrophysics is that even the most advanced computer models cannot bring white dwarves to detonate as a supernova. And scientists have no idea either. And we have been watching these supernovae for a long time and very thoroughly as standard candles are important for astronomers so they pay close attention to them.

Now, Javier Acevedo from Queen's University in Canada and Joseph Bramante from the Canadian Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics went wild and say that the detonator for white dwarf supernovae could be a tiny black hole made from dark matter that grows in the core of the white dwarf.

This sounds totally cool. As Bramante says, it could be a proton-sized dark hole that has extreme mass. Nonetheless, there still is a problem – we still have no clue what dark matter actually is. This allows us to bring dark matter into many hypotheses as an all-powerful substance but we aren't really helping ourselves. And so it goes for dark matter as a supernova detonator as well. It will probably not help us by much.

Acevedo and Bramant are thinking about asymmetrical dark matter – that is dark matter that fits the baryon matter asymmetry where we see more matter compared to antimatter. They came to the conclusion that if there was more than 10 to the power of 11 GeV mass of dark matter inside the white dwarf (that is about 100 billion protons) it could allow the white dwarf to detonate as an Ia type supernova though a fascinating mechanism.

The dark matter would collapse alongside the white dwarf creating a tiny black hole. As the black hole evaporated through Hawking radiation – the radiation would ignite the supernova. All that is left then is just sit back and enjoy the stellar fireworks.

Sources:

• https://www.newscientist.com/article/2226326-black-holes-formed-from-dark-matter-could-be-making-dead-stars-explode/
• https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.043020

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