Few things are more mind bending than black holes, gravitational waves, and the nearly massless hypothetical particles called axions, which could be the mysterious dark matter whose gravity holds galaxies together. Now, a team of theoretical physicists has tied all three together in a surprising way. If the axion exists and has the right mass, they argue, then a spinning black hole should produce a vast cloud of the particles, which should, in turn, produce gravitational waves akin to those discovered a year ago by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). If the idea is correct, LIGO might be able to detect axions, albeit indirectly.
“It's an awesome idea,” says Tracy Slatyer, a particle astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. “The [LIGO] data is going to be there, and it would be amazing if we saw something.” Benjamin Safdi, a theoretical particle physicist at MIT, is also enthusiastic. “This is really the best idea we have to look for particles in this mass range,” he says.
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