+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Astrophysics, Cosmology & Astronomy (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-74.html)
+--- Thread: Research A 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form? (study) (/thread-15471.html)
A 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form? (study) - C C - Feb 19, 2024
There may be a 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form, new study suggests
https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/there-may-be-a-dark-mirror-universe-within-ours-where-atoms-failed-to-form-new-study-suggests
EXCERPT: . . . It might be easy to think that because matter and dark matter operate with different rules, one would be totally dominant over the other. But despite having wildly different properties, the amounts of normal matter and dark matter are still in the same ballpark. That seems like a strange coincidence. To explain this, scientists proposed there could be some sort of hidden link between them. They published their research Jan. 22 on the preprint journal arXiv.
The researchers posited that for every physical interaction in normal matter, there's a mirror of it in the world of dark matter. This would be a new kind of symmetry in nature, connecting the normal and dark matter worlds, the researchers said.
This symmetry would help explain why dark matter and regular matter have roughly the same abundances.
In the paper, the researchers point out another strange coincidence. In the physics of normal matter, a neutron and proton have almost exactly the same mass, which enables them to bind together and form stable atoms. If a proton was just a little bit heavier, it would be totally unstable and decay in only a few minutes, making the formation of atoms impossible. In this imaginary scenario, the universe would be left with a sea of free-floating neutrons.
Perhaps, the researchers suggest, this imaginary, broken cosmos may be a reality in the dark matter mirror version of our universe. A special combination of physics led to a proton having roughly the same mass as a neutron; perhaps in the dark matter mirror, that combination of physics played out differently, causing the "dark proton" to evaporate and leave behind a sea of "dark neutrons" — what we identify as dark matter.
While this proposed mirror model allows for the possibility of rich interactions among dark matter particles — dark atoms, dark chemistry and a dark periodic table of dark elements — there can't be too much interaction, the researchers noted. If the dark matter interacts with itself a lot, it would tend to clump up far more than scientists think it does. So most of the dark matter has to be relatively simple — a sea of free-floating, neutral particles.
These additional interactions, which would be a dark mirror of our chemical world, may enable future scientists to test this theory... (MORE - missing details)