Researchers have published a new paper suggesting that the universe began not with one, but with two big bangs. This hypothesis tries to explain the existence of dark matter, by positing that the first big bang created ordinary matter, and the second one produced dark matter.
According to the standard model of cosmology, the universe is made up largely of dark matter and dark energy. As dark matter does not interact with light or the gravitational field, there have been no means to observe it. However, by observing the way other celestial bodies like stars behaved, scientists concluded that there must be some other mass in the universe that influenced them, and so the idea of dark matter came up to describe that unobservable mass. But the question was, where did it come from?
That's what the new hypothesis tries to explain. And with the technology that we have, the researchers say that it is possible to test it out.
(Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team; ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt)