Researchers from the University of Lyon in France believe that dark matter, the elusive material that makes up the majority of the mass in the Universe, could be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang, or cosmic particles from extra dimensions. Based on the data, these particles may have been created in the perfect quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be viewed through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. Read more for a video and additional information.
The researchers discovered these hypothetical gravitons while search for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists purport exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time. That’s right, when gravity propagates through these extra dimensions, it then materializes in our universe as large gravitons, interacting weakly with ordinary matter via the force of gravity. This lines right up to what we know so far about dark matter thus far.
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The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence. Due to their very weak interactions, they decay so slowly that they remain stable over the lifetime of the Universe,” Cacciapaglia said, “For the same reason, they are slowly produced during the expansion of the Universe and accumulate there until today,” said Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France.
