WHAT IS DARK MATTER MADE OF?

The phenomena may have come from quantum bags that got squished together in the early universe

- Paul M. Sutter

Paul M. Sutter

Paul Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is also the author of two books: Your Place in the Universe and How to Die in Space.

Dark matter – the mysterious, invisible substance that exerts gravity but doesn’t interact with light – might be made of tiny black holes permeating the universe. And according to a new theory, those black holes might have been made from Fermi balls, quantum ‘bags’ of subatomic particles known as fermions that got smooshed together in dense pockets during the universe’s infancy.

This theory could explain why dark matter came to dominate the universe. Scientists Ke-Pan Xie and collaborator Kiyoharu Kawana, from the Center for Theoretical Physics at Seoul National University in South Korea have devised a new scenario to explain how dark matter came to dominate the universe: in the midst of an incredible transformation when the cosmos was less than a second old, a new kind of particle got trapped, collapsing to such a small point that they transformed into black holes. Those black holes then flooded the universe, providing the heft required to explain dark matter.