You're not on the trail - the trail is on you

(Uh oh. Someone just showed up. Gotta go! Happy Halloween!)

If we look at a nearby star-forming galaxy, that's like having thousands of Betelgeuse signals, all added together, allowing us to put even stronger limits on axion properties. If axions really are dark matter, we are slowly but surely closing in on their nature!

Betelgeuse is much bigger and hotter than the Sun, so searching for axion X-ray signals there allows us to put stronger constraints on the possible properties of axions, since we don't detect them from there either. But can we do a bigger experiment than that?

The production and decay of axions would produce a faint excess X-ray signal from the Sun, so observing the Sun allows us to put limits on how large and interactive an axion must be, if it exists. But in order to improve those limits, we need to find a bigger star. Like, say, Betelgeuse!

The centers of stars like our Sun are extremely hot environments which may produce axions, a hypothesized tiny, unimaginably light particle that is a candidate for dark matter AND might solve the matter/anti-matter asymmetry problem in particle physics, so there's lots of interest in finding them!

Indeed! In fact, this is why I like a model of environmental stewardship - if human feet are on Mars, affecting the Martian environment is inevitable, which calls for an active mode of care for the environment as opposed to passively trying to avoid impact, which would be doomed to failure.

I gave a talk about planetary stewardship at the Mars Society Convention a few years ago, and the intrinsic value of the abiotic Martian landscape was something I very briefly touched on - it's nice to see stuff like that get unpacked in a much more detailed way than I could do.