Physicists from the University of Melbourne in Australia have proposed a new theory for the origin of dark matter. The study, which was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, is summarized in a press release on Phys.org.
According to scientists, the early universe underwent a series of phase transitions, as a result of which structures appeared that resemble gas bubbles growing at the speed of light in boiling water, only the bubbles were formed by a true (ordinary) vacuum. If dark matter particles acquire mass during a phase transition, then it is difficult for them to penetrate the boundaries of the bubbles, they bounce off and are destroyed. Ultimately, the bubbles merge, and only those particles that remained inside them survived to our time, making up the dark matter that is observed using indirect methods.
Previously, the preferred scenario was a phase transition, as a result of which the ordinary matter of the Universe cooled and could no longer effectively interact with certain particles that now leave dark matter. According to the new scenario, dark matter particles can be much heavier than previously proposed candidates, which allows new experiments to detect them.
The dark matter problem (also known as the hidden mass problem) in cosmology is that many of the observed gravitational interactions cannot be explained based on estimates of visible (baryonic) matter alone. Nevertheless, the existence of dark matter particles has not yet been confirmed experimentally.
