New Rare 'Kaiju' Star Discovered With a Lens Made of Dark Matter
Story by Michelle Starr • Yesterday 10:46 PM
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New Rare 'Kaiju' Star Discovered With a Lens Made of Dark Matter
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A newly discovered star is so large, bright, and strange that its appearance could be pointing us towards a clump of dark matter in the sky.
Named Mothra by its discoverers, it seems bizarrely bright in the sky, for the 10.4 billion years it has taken to reach us. This places it in the class of extremely rare "kaiju" stars: distant monster stars with anomalously huge apparent brightness, according to a team led by astrophysicist José Diego of the Spanish National Research Council in Spain.
The discovery has been detailed in a preprint paper published on arXiv.
One other star has been identified in this category, and it's significantly brighter than Mothra. Its name is Godzilla, also discovered by Diego and colleagues, and it's been identified as the most luminous known star in the sky.
Despite their differences, the two stars have some intriguing similarities that suggest massive blobs of dark matter are lurking in the space between us and them.
More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-rare-kaiju-star-discovered-with-a-lens-made-of-dark-matter/ar-AA1eIzPC