The search for the universe’s dark matter could end tomorrow—given a nearby supernova and a little luck. The nature of dark matter has eluded astronomers for 90 years, since the realization that 85% of the matter in the universe is not visible through our telescopes. The most likely dark matter candidate today is the axion, a lightweight particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, now argue that the axion could be discovered within seconds of the detection of gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion. Axions, if they exist, would be produced in copious quantities during the first 10 seconds after the core collapse of a massive star into a neutron star, and those axions would escape and be transformed into high-energy gamma rays in the star’s intense magnetic field.
Dark matter obviously fascinates me. But one of the things that hooks me is: if it doesn’t exist, our standard model of the universe doesn’t work and we know nothing.
Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.
There’s lovely accidental poetics in science, all the time:
In 2023, Freese and Winkler proposed that dark matter, unlike ordinary matter, may have arisen from a distinct Big Bang event, which could have taken place months after the conventional Big Bang. In this model, dark matter particles are produced via the decay of a quantum field that only couples to the Dark Sector and is initially trapped in a false metastable vacuum state.
The Dark Sector! The Dark Big Bang!
On Sunday November 23, 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr. Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own.”
We’ve only known there is more than one galaxy for a hundred years.
