Pulsars Hunt Dark Matter: What the Search Revealed ⚡ экспресс
Pulsar timing arrays, which track the rhythm of distant pulsars, can detect not only gravitational waves but also the influence of ultralight dark matter. In a new study, astronomers searched for two types of signals: oscillations in the gravitational potential (scalar field dark matter) and a fifth force (from dark photons). Although no definitive evidence was found, the possibility that such matter makes up all the dark mass in the universe cannot yet be ruled out. For the first time, constraints on dark photons were obtained from a European array, and they are comparable to existing ones.
The universe is full of invisible stuff — dark matter. We feel its gravity, but what is it made of? Perhaps it’s an ocean of ultralight particles, so tiny in mass that they act more like waves than particles. To sense this cosmic ripple, scientists turned to the most precise beacons — pulsars.
Pulsars are the remains of massive stars, crushed to city-size and spinning hundreds of times a second. Their radio beams pierce space with the regularity of atomic clocks. If a wave of dark matter washed through them, that flawless beat would falter.
Years of observation found no deviations. But for the first time, limits were set for two such forms of matter: ultralight particles and dark photons.
🎯 Ultralight dark matter particles are billions of times lighter than an electron — so small that their behavior resembles waves more than familiar particles.