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Description
The intensity frontier offers a novel approach to probing fundamental physics, seeking evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model in rare processes by enhancing the statistics in the system under study. Astrophysical environments provide natural laboratories for this approach: the extreme temperatures and densities found in the interior of compact objects can dramatically enhance the production of new particles, making these systems powerful probes of feebly interacting candidates. In this talk I will discuss two paradigmatic examples of how astrophysical observations of compact stars can be used to explore the low-energy phenomenology of light bosons. Core-collapse supernovae are among the most promising environments for investigating axions and other light pseudoscalars, offering unique opportunities to probe these elusive particles through their impact on supernova dynamics and their associated neutrino signal. Cold, isolated neutron stars, in turn, provide exceptional laboratories for testing other light bosons predicted by extensions of the Standard Model. In particular, their long-term thermal evolution can probe dark sectors and fifth forces with sensitivities to interaction strengths and force ranges that that remain inaccessible to terrestrial experiments.