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Cosmologist: Could dark matter be heavy?

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From ScienceDaily:

For decades, physicists have been working on the theory that dark matter is light and therefore interacts weakly with ordinary matter. This means that the particles are capable of being produced in colliders. This theory’s dark particles are called weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), and they are theorized to have been created in an inconceivably large number shortly after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

“But since no experiments have ever seen even a trace of a WIMP, it could be that we should look for a heavier dark particle that interacts only by gravity and thus would be impossible to detect directly,” says Martin Sloth.

Sloth and his colleagues call their version of such a heavy particle a PIDM particle (Planckian Interacting Dark Matter). More. Abstract (public access) (Mathias Garny, McCullen Sandora, Martin S. Sloth. Planckian Interacting Massive Particles as Dark Matter. Physical Review Letters, 2016; 116 (10) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.101302)

See also: How do dark energy and dark matter relate to ID?

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Comments
Could dark matter be heavy? Is the paper weird? Outlandish ? Rest assured that it is based on String theory!Me_Think
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Of related note: Hubble Finds Ring of Dark Matter – with video https://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic0709e/ The Dark Matter 'conspiracy' - Apr 30, 2015 Excerpt: One of the most surprising scientific discoveries of the 20th century was that spiral galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, rotate much faster than expected, powered by an extra gravitational force of invisible 'dark matter'. Since this discovery 40 years ago, we have learned this mysterious substance, which is probably an exotic elementary particle, makes up about 85 per cent of the mass in the known Universe, leaving only 15 per cent to be the ordinary stuff encountered in our everyday lives. Dark matter is central to our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve and is ultimately one of the reasons for the existence of life on Earth – yet we know almost nothing about it. "One of the surprising findings of this study was that spiral galaxies maintain a remarkably constant rotation speed throughout their disks," Dr Cappellari said. "This means stars and dark matter conspire to redistribute themselves to produce this effect, with stars dominating in the inner regions of the galaxies, and a gradual shift in the outer regions to dark matter dominance." But the 'conspiracy' does not come out naturally from the models, and some fine-tuning is required to explain the observations. http://phys.org/news/2015-04-dark-conspiracy.html Dark Matter evidence - high school level math- video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQLKS6BECdobornagain77
March 22, 2016
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