When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration shows a spiral of hot dark matter spewing forward from the Big Bang . | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)New research suggests that dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious “stuff,” may actually have been born “hot.” If this is the case, the best current model we have of cosmic evolution, the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM), may need serious revision or overwriting altogether, altering the rules of the epic game of hide and seek that has been ongoing between dark matter and scientists for decades.Dark matter is a headache for researchers because it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation, light, in layman’s terms. This not only makes dark matter effectively invisible, but it also means that scientists know it can’t be made of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that compose the atoms making up everything from the most massive stars down to the tiniest bacteria, because they do interact with light. Couple this with the fact that dark matter outweighs ordinary matter in the universe by a ratio of five to one.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis mystery has sparked a search for candidate particles for dark matter beyond the standard model of particle physics. Thus far, this search has favored “cold” dark matter, which doesn’t refer to temperature but instead references the speed at which the particles move (cold meaning much slower than light, hot meaning moving at speeds approaching light). In the standard picture, cold dark matter emerges from the hot and dense soup of energy that filled the early universe.The new research suggests an alternative origin. Dark matter could have instead been born extremely hot, opening up alternative possibilities of how it interacts with everyday matter.The team proposes that incredibly hot dark matter moving at near-light speeds could have been born in the universe during a period called post-inflationary reheating. This refers to the point at which the inflation field driving the rapid initial expansion of the universe decayed and transformed into a hot and incredibly dense ” …
