Our own Sun might actually be a giant factory for that mysterious, invisible 'dark energy' that’s pushing the universe apart.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Probing Solar Symmetrons with Direct Detection
arXiv · 2604.09283
The Takeaway
Scientists are looking for "symmetrons," theoretical particles that could explain how the universe expands. They've realized the Sun should be pumping these out, allowing us to hunt for dark energy right in our own solar system.
From the abstract
We provide the first investigation of the solar production of symmetrons, a well-motivated class of screened scalar fields with density dependent couplings to the Standard Model, and their subsequent absorption in underground direct detection experiments. We compute the flux of symmetrons produced through photon conversion in the magnetic field of the solar tachocline, and constrain the resulting luminosity to not exceed 3% of the observed solar output. Even under the conservative assumption tha