Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the “normal,” baryonic, matter in the Universe. New results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter.
The Big Bang didn’t just result in our familiar universe, according to a bold new theory presented by physicist Neil Turok and colleagues at the Perimeter Institute- it also created a second “anti-universe” that extended backwards in time, in a mirror image of our own that could explain the existence of dark matter.
In the art world, “pentimento,” an alteration, an overlay on a painting, hides evidence of traces of a previous work. In a similar vein, British physicist Sir Roger Penrose argues that extinct universes exist that were filled with ghost black holes that are hidden, embedded in the Cosmic Microwave Background map, and may have harbored alien civilizations from an eon that preceded the Big Bang.
This past fall, a team of astronomers detected 10 billion solar masses worth of dark matter from an ancient dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago carried along by the S1 star stream that harbors our Solar System streaming directly towards the Sun.
“We now think that both dark matter and dark energy can be unified into a fluid which possesses a type of ‘negative gravity’, repelling all other material around them,” says Jamie Farnes from the Oxford University e-Research Center. “The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses.”
