A New Idea for How Dark Matter Came to Dominate the Universe

A new paper hypothesizes how the amount of dark matter could have grown exponentially in the early universe.

By Will Sullivan
Jan 6, 2022 5:00 PM
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(Credit: NASA/JPL/California Institute of Technology)

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(Inside Science) — Eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is thought to be "dark" matter invisible to humans and our scientific instruments. But scientists don't know what dark matter is made of or how it was created in the early universe. 

Now, a group of researchers has proposed a new recipe for the mysterious substance: a dark matter particle colliding with an ordinary matter particle and transforming it into a new dark matter particle. This process would have continued until the universe settled at the amount of dark matter present today. 

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