Stars of the Dark World

• Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

August 30, 2024 3:30 PM
PAIS 1100

Host:

Huaiyu Duan

Presenter:

Dr. George Fuller (UCSD)

Video Recording

Our otherwise successful Standard Model of particle physics cannot explain key measurements made in observational astronomy and cosmology as well as in some laboratory experiments. And this is not a little problem! We know that roughly 95% of the content of the universe is in unknown forms, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. There are many cogent and plausible ideas for what the former is, ranging from new beyond-Standard Model particles to tiny “primordial” black holes and even entire “Dark Sectors” of physics. So far, our best probes of these ideas come from a comparison of observations of the largest scales in the universe with numerical structure formation simulations. But there is a possibility that this Dark World also affects stars and smaller scale structures. I will talk about stars and how an insidious cabal of neutrinos and the nonlinear nature of gravitation can set them up for instability. In turn, that could transform some kinds of stars into laboratories for exploring the dark side of the universe. 

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