Astronomers have proposed a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the matter in the Universe. They have studied whether a fraction of dark matter particles may have a tiny electrical charge.
"You've heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter," said Julian Munoz of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that has been published in the journal Nature. "However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales."
Munoz and his collaborator, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., explore the possibility that these charged dark matter particles interact with normal matter by the electromagnetic force.
Their new work dovetails with a recently announced result from the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR (Epoch of Reionization) Signature (EDGES) collaboration. In February, scientists from this project said they had detected the radio signature from the first generation of stars, and possible evidence for interaction between dark matter and normal matter. Some astronomers quickly challenged the EDGES claim. Meanwhile, Munoz and Loeb were already looking at the theoretical basis underlying it.
"We're able to tell a fundamental physics story with our research no matter how you interpret the EDGES result," said Loeb, who is the chair of the Harvard astronomy department. "The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science and we need to use any related new data to tackle it."
The story begins with the first stars, which emitted ultraviolet (UV) light. According to the commonly accepted scenario, this UV light interacted with cold hydrogen atoms in gas lying between the stars and enabled them to absorb the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang.
This absorption should have led to a drop in intensity of the CMB during this period, which occurs less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. The EDGES team claimed to detect evidence for this absorption of CMB light, though this has yet to be independently verified by other scientists. However, the temperature of the hydrogen gas in the EDGES data is about half of the expected value.
