‘Cosmic Plasma Bubbles’ Might Have Helped Create Dark Matter, New Study Says

The authors of the new research focused their attention on the period of time immediately after the birth of the universe.

The emergence of enigmatic substance known as dark matter during the dawn of our universe might’ve been a product of certain processes that occurred shortly after the Big Bang, Live Science reports citing a new study published in The Physical Review Letters journal.

According to the media outlet, Andrew Long, an assistant professor of physics at Rice University in Houston and co-author of the new research, pointed out that while scientists already know “how much dark matter our universe contains”, the same cannot not be said about its nature and origins.

In order to answer these questions, Long and his colleagues, physicists Michael Baker at the University of Melbourne in Australia and Joachim Kopp from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, turned their attention to the “earliest period of the universe’s formation, a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang started”.

The researchers postulate that immediately after the Big Bang, “the plasma underwent a phase transition similar to what happens now when matter moves from one state to another”, as the media outlet puts it, with “bubbles of cooled plasma” expanding and merging “until the whole universe transitioned to a new phase”.

Sourse: sputniknews.com