Did dark matter destroy the universe? You might be looking around
at the way things “exist” and thinking “No”, but we’re talking about
ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the
universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms
out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to
have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why?
Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central
black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the
breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have another idea. Dan
Hooper and Alexander Belikov posit that invisible, self-destructing
dark matter may have blown up every atom in the universe. At least
it’s plausible in that if we wanted to ionize an entire universe, we’d
want something that sounded that awesome.
Dark matter is a
candidate for providing ionizing radiation because, if it exists at
all, it’s its own antiparticle: if two dark matter particles hit each
other they can blow up. Insane as it sounds, the theory predicts that
despite making up most of everything the particles themselves are so
tiny, and so terribly fussy about colliding, that they can form huge
structures without destroying themselves. Positron emissions which may
be an indication of exactly this kind of self-destruction have been
observed by the European PAMELA satellite currently orbiting the Earth.
As
theories go, this one is more awesome than accepted. The quasar
hypothesis has wide support, and crediting something we’ve never even
seen with reshaping the universe may be going a little far. Then
again, that’s what modern cosmology is doing with dark matter anyway,
so maybe this idea will fit right in.
Posted by Luke McKinney
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