“You will be assimilated.” In Star Trek, members of the strange and sinister race known as the Borg would utter this threat as if one. Their behaviour could be echoed in space if dark matter exists in a particular form: if so, it could create Borg-like stars in which every particle is in the same state at the same time.
Dark matter accounts for 80 percent of the matter in the universe, but we can’t observe it directly and its constituents are a mystery.
One theory is that dark matter could be made of particles called axions. Unlike protons, neutrons and electrons that make up ordinary matter, axions can share the same quantum energy state. They also attract each other gravitationally, so they clump together.
Together, those two properties mean that the clumps would exist as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) – a state of matter in which all the particles occupy the same quantum state, according to calculations by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues.
“They act like one super-atom together,” says Prescod-Weinstein. But those clumps are prone to fracturing, she adds. “The configuration the axions ‘want’ to settle into is not one giant BEC.” Rather, they break apart into smaller clumps, which the team calls Bose stars.
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