New research proposes the theory of a "dark mirror universe", which suggests that dark matter may come from our mirrored universe, explaining the mystery of its abundance but invisibility.
The nature of dark matter, an invisible and untouchable cosmic matter, has always been one of the biggest mysteries in the field of cosmology. A new study has made a bold guess that this mysterious substance may originate from a "dark mirror universe" that has been with us since the beginning of the universe.
Imagine if the dark matter world were our mirror image, just following a different set of physical rules, it all seemed to explain. According to the new theory, this could explain why dark matter seems to fill the universe but is invisible.
Dark matter is a mysterious and unknown substance, estimated to be about 5 times the mass of conventional matter, which is the mass of most of the universe. It does not interact with either light or ordinary matter, and scientists can only detect it indirectly through its gravitational influence on ordinary matter, such as the movement of stars inside galaxies and the evolution of large-scale structures in the universe.
Since matter and dark matter follow different rules of physics, it's easy to think that one of them would completely dominate the universe. However, despite their very different properties, the amounts of normal matter and dark matter are roughly comparable. This seems like a strange coincidence. To explain this, scientists have suggested that there may be some kind of hidden connection between the two. Their findings were published Jan. 22 in the preprint journal Arxiv.
The researchers hypothesize that there is a mirror version of every physical interaction of normal matter in the dark matter world. They see it as a new natural symmetry that connects the normal matter and dark matter worlds.
This symmetry could explain why dark matter and conventional matter have roughly the same abundance.
* also points out another strange coincidence. In the physics of normal matter, neutrons and protons have almost equal mass, allowing them to combine to form stable atoms. If the proton is a little heavier, it will be completely unstable and will decay within a few minutes, making it impossible for atoms to form. In this hypothetical scenario, the universe would be left with only a free-floating sea of neutrons.
Researchers have proposed that this hypothetical, fragmented universe could be the reality in a mirrored version of our universe's dark matter. A special physical mechanism causes the "dark protons" in the dark matter universe to have similar masses to the "dark neutrons"; And in our mirror universe, this mechanism may evolve in different ways, causing the "dark protons" to decay, leaving behind a sea of "dark neutrons" – the dark matter we detect.
The researchers note that while the mirror model allows for a wealth of interactions between dark matter particles (dark atoms, dark chemistry, and dark periodic table), this interaction should not be too frequent. If there is a lot of interaction between dark matter, it tends to be more concentrated than scientists think. As a result, most of the dark matter must be relatively simple – made up of free-floating, neutral particles.
These additional interactions, which act as mirror images of our chemical world, may enable future scientists to test this theory. In the early universe, normal matter underwent nucleosynthesis, and the first elements were formed in the nuclear plasma. If this new idea is correct, then dark matter will also undergo mirror nucleosynthesis. In the chaotic state of the early universe, there may have been a passage between the two worlds that allowed them to influence each other.
By carefully measuring the rate of elemental formation (something the Next Generation Space Observatory plans to do), scientists may be able to find evidence of one of these channels and get a glimpse of what the mirror dark universe really looks like.