• Question: hi! my question is: are there any theory about what black matter is? or any ideas of what it might be?

    Asked by anon-267456 on 5 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      A friend of Zsolt and me called Bradley Kavanagh is an expert in this so I asked him. He says: “Plenty of theories! It could be a new particle that we haven’t discovered yet, which doesn’t interact with light in the way ordinary matter does. That is, it can only interact very weakly with other particle, so they’re sometimes called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Another possibility is a particle called the axion, which we expect to be around because it helps us understand some unusual properties of protons and neutrons. Even weirder would be small black holes, about as heavy as an asteroid but much smaller, which could be formed in the very early Universe.”
      So there you are. I trust Bradley’s expertise, except in board games when he makes terrible decisions.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 7 Nov 2020:

      Astrophysicists have lots of theories about dark matter. From remembering a talk I gave on the topic of dark matter candidates during undergraduate (astrophysics/cosmology isn’t really my area of expertise!), there are 5 main candidates: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, Axions, Ultralight dark matter, Sterile neutrinos, and Self-interacting dark matter.

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