Scientists have proposed that dark matter, an unidentified cosmic material that is considered one of the biggest mysteries in science, was forged in a

Physicists Are Searching for Signs of a Second 'Dark' Big Bang to Solve a Major Mystery

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2023-03-16 11:30:06

Scientists have proposed that dark matter, an unidentified cosmic material that is considered one of the biggest mysteries in science, was forged in a second “Dark Big Bang” that occurred within one month of the birth of our universe, according to a recent study.

This wild new “alternate cosmology” could account for some of the most perplexing riddles about dark matter, which is about five times more abundant than the regular visible matter that makes up stars and planets, yet has still evaded direct detection.

Scientists believe that dark matter exists because we can see its gravitational effects on regular matter; for instance, galaxies are held together by dense clumps of dark matter called halos. But though its ghostly influence can be indirectly observed, attempts to actually capture a dark matter particle here on Earth have consistently failed, suggesting that this material exists in some kind of shadow realm that has only the most tenuous gravitational link with our own visible universe.

Katherine Freese and Martin Wolfgang Winkler, two physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, have now proposed that dark matter is such a bizarre outlier because it has a completely different genesis than the rest of the universe.