An entirely new type of star could be shining brightly at the heart of our galaxy. Instead of burning nuclear fuel like the sun, this star would be powered partly or wholly by dark matter.
“We call them ‘dark-matter burners’,” says Igor Moskalenko of Stanford University in California. “If they exist, they would look highly unusual, pumping out more light than expected from their mass.”
Dark matter is the unseen stuff that is thought to account for about 90 per cent of the mass of galaxies. One popular theory of dark matter says that it is made of weakly interacting…
