It is believed that the universe produced dark matter during the first few minutes of the Big Bang. Scientists assume that those particles got trapped into ultradense pockets, which splintered off to become black holes. These cosmic voids likely dissolved into a shower of multiple dark matter particle "species, " creating a "dark matter periodic table" of invisible elements.
Understanding the Nature of Dark Matter
Dark matter is a component of the universe described as nonluminous material postulated to take several forms. This mysterious, invisible form of matter makes up most of the universe's mass.
Physicists still struggle to describe dark matter, although the circumstantial evidence for its existence, such as rotation rates of stars within galaxies and the most significant structures visible in the cosmos, have been identified. While cosmologists and astronomers have identified such proofs, they have not determined what dark matter is.
Previous studies assume that dark matter is a single extremely lightweight particle that floods the cosmos and hardly interacts with normal matter. However, intense searches for new such particles came up empty. This made experts wonder if dark matter particles might be much rarer and heavier. Still, theoretical physicists struggle to find models representing the early universe with the right number of heavy particles.
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Invisible Periodic Table of Elements
In a new study, a team of researchers found a way to understand the creation of massive dark matter particles right after the Big Bang. Their trick was to sprinkle in black holes.
The researchers noted that the young universe underwent a severe phase transition as the forces of nature split off each other and went from a single unified force into the four fundamental forces we have today. The underlying physics changed at each transition. As scientists recreated the first few seconds of the Big Bang in particle accelerators, they observed the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merging into one.
In their model, the earliest form of dark matter was light but the one from later periods was heavy. The scenario shows that dark matter gets trapped inside the bubbles, where the densities increase to the point where they all collapse and form black holes.
Those black holes soon evaporated and caused the dark matter to come back. This mechanism limits the total amount of massive dark matter in the cosmos because only so much can escape the void before evaporating completely.
Meanwhile, the evaporation process generates a slew of dark matter particle species. These particles share many characteristics but differ in speed, mass, and ways of interacting with normal matter. As the model suggests, dark matter is a vast collection of various kinds of particles, much like normal matter is made of the entire periodic table of elements.
The experimental evidence for this idea is still a deeply hypothetical concept and will be supported only by the direct detection of one or more dark matter particle species. As astronomers develop ways to observe gravitational waves from the Big Bang, the result of their investigation can provide us with direct observational access to the critical epoch in the history of the cosmos.
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