A Sun-like star orbiting a boson star

0575217 - FZÚ 2024 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Pombo, Alexandre Mira - Saltas, Ippocratis
A Sun-like star orbiting a boson star.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Roč. 524, č. 3 (2023), s. 4083-4090. ISSN 0035-8711. E-ISSN 1365-2966
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GM21-16583M
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) LQ100102101
Program: Prémie Lumina quaeruntur
Institutional support: RVO:68378271
Keywords : binaries: general * Black holes * kinematics and dynamics
OECD category: Particles and field physics
Impact factor: 4.8, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad2151

The high-precision astrometric mission GAIA recently reported the remarkable discovery of a Sun-like star closely orbiting a dark object with a semimajor axis and period of 1.4 au and 187.8 d, respectively. While the plausible expectation for the central dark object is a black hole, the evolutionary mechanism leading to the formation of such a two-body system is highly challenging. Here, we challenge the scenario of a central black hole and show that the observed orbital dynamics can be explained under fairly general assumptions if the central dark object is a stable clump of bosonic particles of spin-0 or spin-1, known as a boson star. Aside from possible formation mechanisms leading to a star orbiting a boson star, we show that the theory space of boson stars allows for a fairly natural mimicker of binary observations such as the recent one by GAIA.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0350039