Deep in the center of our galaxy, scientists believe a strange type of star may be quietly glowing—not from fusion like our Sun, but from the invisible fuel of dark matter.
These “dark dwarfs” could act like cosmic detectors, collecting heavy, elusive particles that heat them from the inside. If we find them—and especially if we spot one missing its lithium—it could finally point us toward what dark matter really is.
Dark Dwarfs & Dark Matter Basics
The Anglo-USA team behind the study named them dark dwarfs. Not because they are dark bodies—on the contrary—but because of their special link with dark matter, one of the most central topics in current cosmology and astrophysics research. “We think that 25% of the universe is composed of a type of matter that doesn’t emit light, making it invisible to our eyes and telescopes. We only detect it through its gravitational effects. That’s why we call it dark matter,” explains Jeremy Sakstein, Professor of Physics at the University of Hawai‘i and one of the study’s authors.
What we know today about dark matter is that it exists and how it behaves, but not yet what it actually is. Over the past fifty years, several hypotheses have been proposed, but none have yet gathered enough experimental evidence to prevail. Studies like the one by Sakstein and colleagues are important because they offer concrete tools to break this deadlock.
Among the most well-known dark matter candidates are the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs)—very massive particles that interact very weakly with ordinary matter: they pass through things unnoticed, don’t emit light and don’t respond to electromagnetic forces (so they don’t reflect light and remain invisible), and reveal themselves only through their gravitational effects. This type of dark matter would be necessary for dark dwarfs to exist. “Dark matter interacts gravitationally, so it could be captured by stars and accumulate inside them. If that happens, it might also interact with itself and annihilate, releasing energy that heats the star,” Sakstein explains.
How Dark Matter Powers Tiny Stars
Ordinary stars—like our Sun—shine because nuclear fusion processes occur in their cores, generating large amounts of heat and energy. Fusion happens when a star’s mass is large enough that gravitational forces compress matter toward the centre with such intensity that they trigger reactions between atomic nuclei. This process releases a huge amount of energy, which we see as light. Dark dwarfs also emit light—but not because of nuclear fusion. “Dark dwarfs are very low mass objects, about 8% of the Sun’s mass,” Sakstein explains. Such a small mass is not sufficient to trigger fusion reactions. For this reason, such objects—although very common in the universe—usually only emit a faint light (due to the energy produced by their relatively small gravitational contraction) and are known to scientists as brown dwarfs.
However, if brown dwarfs are located in regions where dark matter is particularly abundant—such as the centre of our galaxy—they can transform into something else. “These objects collect the dark matter that helps them become a dark dwarf. The more dark matter you have around, the more you can capture,” Sakstein explains. “And, the more dark matter ends up inside the star, the more energy will be produced through its annihilation.”
But all of this relies on a specific type of dark matter. “For dark dwarfs to exist, dark matter has to be made of WIMPs, or any heavy particle that interacts with itself so strongly to produce visible matter,” Sakstein says. Other candidates proposed to explain dark matter—such as axions, fuzzy ultralight particles, or sterile neutrinos—are all too light to produce the expected effect in these objects. Only massive particles, capable of interacting with each other and annihilating into visible energy, could power a dark dwarf.
Finding the Lithium Signature
This entire hypothesis, however, would have little value if there weren’t a concrete way to identify a dark dwarf. For this reason, Sakstein and colleagues propose a distinctive marker: “There were a few markers, but we suggested the Lithium-7 because it would really be a unique effect,” the scientist explains. Lithium-7 burns very easily and is quickly consumed in ordinary stars. “So if you were able to find an object which looked like a dark dwarf, you could look for the presence of this lithium because it wouldn’t be there if it were a brown dwarf or a similar object.”
Tools like the James Webb Space Telescope might already be able to detect extremely cold celestial objects like dark dwarfs. But, according to Sakstein, there’s another possibility: “The other thing you could do is to look at a whole population of objects and ask, in a statistical manner, if it is better described by having a sub-population of dark dwarfs or not.”
What Dark Dwarfs Could Reveal
If, in the coming years, we manage to identify one or more dark dwarfs, how strong would that clue be in support of the hypothesis that dark matter is made of WIMPs? “Reasonably strong. With light dark matter candidates, something like an axion, I don’t think you’d be able to get something like a dark dwarf. They don’t accumulate inside stars.
“If we manage to find a dark dwarf, it would provide compelling evidence that dark matter is heavy, interacts strongly with itself, but only weakly with the Standard Model. This includes classes of WIMPs, but it would include some other more exotic models as well,” concludes Sakstein. “Observing a dark dwarf wouldn’t conclusively tell us that dark matter is a WIMP, but it would mean that it is either a WIMP or something that, for all intents and purposes, behaves like a WIMP.”
Reference: “Dark dwarfs: dark matter-powered sub-stellar objects awaiting discovery at the galactic center” by Djuna Croon, Jeremy Sakstein, Juri Smirnov and Jack Streeter, 7 July 2025, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2025/07/019
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5 Comments
Eight days ago I added a new radiant-pulsing-angular-lines-of-gravity-force video to the other three already uploaded to my ad-free video channel (https://odysee.com/@charlesgshaver:d/5Gravity:c). Again, I demonstrate new motion induced free of any visible forces in earth’s ambient field of gravity at surface level (as opposed to near the center of our galaxy). No dark energy, dark matter or dark stars are needed to explain the additional motion seen, just enough mental illumination to accept what is observed as being real, and/or enough scientific curiosity and objectivity to replicate and/or improve upon my demonstration.
There are other models of self-interacting “dark matter” that do not emit light via annihilation, nor form dark dwarf planets. The daily supply of dark matter proposals continues. Another contrived dark matter scheme to rule out.
Give it up! There is no “dark matter”. Your equations are wrong.
“Stars That Shouldn’t Shine Are Pointing Straight to Dark Matter’s Identity”
No they’re not because dark matter doesn’t inteact with light. It doesn’t absorb or emit light. We only refer to dark matter because of the way it interacts with gravitational phenomena. It’s called “dark” because it doesn’t interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation, making it invisible to telescopes.
The primary evidence for its existence comes from its gravitational effects on visible matter. But this doesn’t mean dark matter is real it just makes another excuse for why scientists dont know what they’re talking about.
Scientists observe that galaxies rotate faster than they should based on the amount of visible matter present. This discrepancy suggests the presence of additional, unseen mass exerting a gravitational pull, which is attributed to dark matter.
Mainly because they dont want to change the paradigm so they make stuff up.
“What we know today about dark matter is that it exists and how it behaves”
We do NOT!!! Why do so many articles make these claims as if they were actually true?
ALL we know is that current models can’t account for all observations without introducing this fudge factor.
Maybe current models need to be modified since they probably don’t yet contain everything we can see and detect and measure and test. Correcting our models would serve us much better than invoking Dark Matter — something we can’t see, detect. measure, test, or even prove exists at all. Dark Matter is kind of like Magic that way.