Can we explain dark matter by adding more dimensions to the universe? [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Paul Sutter



Dark matter particles might interact with each other. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Dark matter could be even weirder than anyone thought, say cosmologists who are suggesting this mysterious substance that accounts for more than 80% of the universe's mass could interact with itself.

"We live in an ocean of dark matter, yet we know very little about what it could be," Flip Tanedo, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California Riverside, said in a statement.

Every attempt to explain dark matter using known physics has come up short, and so Tanedo and his collaborators are developing exotic models that might better match observations. They asked: What if dark matter interacted with itself through a continuum of forces operating in a space with more dimensions than our usual three? It sounds wild, but their model is able to better explain the behavior of stars in small galaxies than traditional, simple dark matter models. So it's worth a shot.

Small galaxies, big problems

Even though cosmologists don't know the identity of dark matter, they do know some of its properties. All observations indicate that the dark matter is made of some new kind of particle, previously unknown to physics. That particle floods each and every galaxy, accounting for more than 80% of their mass. That particle must not interact with light very much, if at all (otherwise we would have seen it by now in astronomical observations). And it must not interact with normal matter very much, if at all (otherwise we would have seen it in particle collider experiments).

More:
https://www.space.com/self-interacting-dark-matter-higher-dimensional-universe