According to most astrophysicists, the main part of the universe is not ordinary baryonic matter, but a mysterious substance – dark matter. It cannot be seen through electromagnetic radiation, but dark matter has a gravitational effect on ordinary matter. Science offers many fantastic theories about its origin: that it is hidden in an additional dimension, that it arose as a result of the second Big Bang, that it is information itself, or even that it does not exist at all – and this is just an illusion.
But human curiosity does not stop researching in order to understand its essence. An astrophysicist from the Flatiron Institute has proposed another exotic potential explanation: dark matter is located in a deformed mirror universe inside our own, where atoms have not been able to form.
The study is based on several intriguing coincidences. First, observations show that there is about the same amount of ordinary and dark matter, which exceeds baryonic by about five times. And secondly, neutrons and protons have almost the same mass, which allows them to form stable atoms — this is a random but stable property of the quantum world, because otherwise our universe would not be home to any of the atoms that make up stars, planets and ourselves.
In fact, the theory suggests that there may be a parallel universe like ours in which neutrons and protons do not have such convenient symmetry in mass. In this world, there is a “soup” of subatomic particles that interact little, which explains why dark matter does not seem to clump together.
It is important to note that this is just one more of many hypotheses that try to explain the mystery of dark matter – an annoying and lingering unknown in our understanding of the universe.
Earlier, we reported on how the Dark Big Bang occurred a month after the birth of the universe.
According to livescience.com
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