Hunting for Dark Matter

by Gabriel Sistare

Supercomputers will soon simulate how dark matter was massively responsible for the origins of our galaxies.

The Royal Astronomical Society reported that the theory that dark matter trapped gases to initiate the birth of galaxies will be tested.

“Thanks to our simulations we know that if our theories of dark matter are correct then the Universe around us should be full of haloes that failed to make a galaxy.” – Professor Carlos Frenk

Referred to as halos, the theory describes blobs of dark matter as capturing gas and debris from the remnants of the Big Bang and heating to intense pressures that finally formed the galaxies we see now.

Researchers speculate that millions of these halos exist in our universe, but not all were responsible for creating galaxies.

But why did some dark matter blobs create the origins of solar systems but some didn’t? It may be that there is a very specific life cycle these halos need to meet to create galaxies—and this is what the cosmologists hope to test.

“”What we’ve seen in our simulations is a cosmic own goal. We already knew that the first generation of stars emitted intense radiation, heating intergalactic gas to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. After that, the gas is so hot that further star formation gets a lot more difficult, leaving haloes with little chance to form galaxies.” – Dr. Till Sawala