What are boson stars? Could we have already detected them using gravitational waves? To answer these questions, the Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías (IGFAE) releases the first of a trilogy of informative videos in collaboration with the Youtube channel of the physicist José Luis Crespo, aka Quantum Fracture.
With the title “Have We Discovered a New Astronomical Object: Boson Stars”, Juan Calderón Bustillo, (Marie Curie “la Caixa junior leader” fellow), Thomas Dent (coordinator of the IGFAE gravitational waves program) and Verónica Villa Ortega (PhD student of this program) participate in this audiovisual piece to explain a work led by the first, recently published in Physical Review Letters. This study proposes that the most massive black hole collision ever observed, which produced the gravitational wave GW190521, could be something even more mysterious: the merger of two boson stars.
References:
- Juan Calderón Bustillo, Nicolas Sanchis-Gual, Alejandro Torres-Forné, José A. Font, Avi Vajpeyi et al. “GW190521 as a merger of Proca stars: a potential new vector boson of 8.7 × 10−13 eV”. Phys. Rev. Lett 126, 081101
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.081101 - Press release:The merger of two boson stars could explain the most massive black hole collision ever observed and prove the existence of dark matter
This video has been co-funded by the Galicia ERDF Operational Program 2014-2020.
