Far from being an edgier sequel to the sitcom starring Jim Parsons, the ‘dark big bang’ – also known as the ‘second’ big bang – is believed by scientists to potentially be the event which brought about dark matter in our universe.
Such an idea was floated by University of Texas researchers Katherine Freese and Martin Wolfgang Winkler in a paper published in Physical Review Dback in April 2023.
The abstract to the research notes the “hot big bang” is considered to be the origin story behind “all matter and radiation in the universe”, and that there is “strong evidence” that the early universe “contained a hot plasma of photons and baryons with a temperature”.
“However, the earliest probes of dark matter originate from much later times around the epoch of structure formation … [The dark big bang] occurs through a phase transition in the dark sector that transforms dark vacuum energy into a hot dark plasma of particles,” the academics write.
Then, just last month, Richard Casey and Cosmin Ilie from Colgate University in New York explored all the possible scenarios in which the dark big bang may have occurred “that remain consistent with current experimental data”.
For those unfamiliar, dark matter pertains to a type of matter which does not interact with light or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
A news release from the university reads: “One of the most pressing mysteries is the origin and the nature of dark matter, which accounts for about 25 per cent of the energy budget of the Universe today.
“While not yet directly detected in underground experiments, or observed in accelerators, the gravitational effects of dark matter have been firmly established on galactic and extragalactic scales.
“Moreover, dark matter leaves observable imprints on the electromagnetic afterglow of the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation.”
And if the idea of there being more than one big bang is earth-shattering (ha) news to you, then you may not be prepared for a study published earlier this year which challenged the concept of the big bang being the originating event for our universe, and suggested it may have had a “secret life” before this.
This theory also has the potential to provide more of an understanding about dark matter.
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