- According to a research published in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers led by Prof. Judd Bowman of Arizona State University has proof of “dark matter,” while attempting to detect the earliest stars in the universe through radio wave signals.
- A signal from the universe’s first stars, born a cosmic heartbeat after the Big Bang, has been detected for the first time. This Discovery offers first direct proof that dark matter exists and that it is made up of low-mass particles. Prof. Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University suggests that the signal is proof of interactions between normal matter and dark matter in the early universe. He says that it provides the first glimpse of physics beyond the Standard Model.
- As per the researchers the signals form the stars, already active 13.6 billion years ago, merely 180 million years after the Big Bang gave rise to the universe, were picked up by a dining table-sized radio spectrometer EDGES in the Australian desert.
- Some observers are calling it as the biggest astronomical breakthrough since the Nobel-capped detection of gravitational waves in 2015.
- Why is it a breakthrough: The researcher says that the chemical elements that make up the earth, the sun and other stars are known, but most of the matter in the universe is invisible and known as ‘dark matter. The existence of dark matter is inferred from its strong gravity, but we have no idea what kind of substance it is. Hence, dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in physics. To solve it astronomers have to travel back in time. Astronomers can see back in time, since it takes light time to reach us. We see the sun as it was eight minutes ago, while the immensely distant first stars in the universe appear to us on earth as they were billions of years in the past.
- It is hoped the discovery will shed light on dark matter which is an invisible, mysterious substance thought to makes up 85% of the matter in the universe.
- The early universe, the data showed, appears to have been twice as cold as previously estimated, at minus 270 degrees Celsius, according to the study published in Nature. The freeze might be explained by ordinary matter interacting with, and losing energy to, dark matter.
- Standard Model and Dark matter: It is invisible to telescopes, and is perceived through its gravitational pull on other objects in the cosmos. However, its existence is not explained by the Standard Model of physics. The Standard Model is the mainstream theory of the fundamental particles that make up matter and the forces that govern them.
- According to the Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, for about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was dark — filled primarily with hydrogen. Then Gravity slowly pulled the densest regions of gas together to form stars.The signals detected in the study came from primordial hydrogen, at a time that light from the first stars made the gas detectable for the first time.
- Our Solar System was formed about nine billion years later.
