The super-fast cooling of the visible matter of the Universe and the unexpectedly early formation of stars and galaxies can be explained by the fact that dark matter has a very weak, but not zero electric charge, astronomers say in an article published in the journal Nature.
“We found out that particles of dark matter can have a small electric charge, about a million times less than that of an electron. Such a tiny charge cannot be detected with the LHC and other particle accelerators. On the other hand, radio signals captured by our colleagues during observations of the young universe suggest that they may exist,”said Abraham Loeb from Harvard University (USA).
At the end of February, astronomers announced an amazing discovery - they managed to fix the traces of stars that existed in the Universe about 180 million years after the Big Bang.
This discovery has spawned a fierce debate among cosmologists and astrophysicists. The fact is that modern theories describing the emergence of the Universe do not allow for such an early birth of stars - 200 million years ago, the Universe was too hot for a sufficient number of hydrogen molecules to arise from which dense clouds of gas and stars could form.
In fact, according to observations from the Hubble, the temperature of the universe at that time was about two times lower than predicted by theory. Therefore, stars could arise almost immediately after the birth of the universe and make its limits transparent in record time. Why this is so, scientists do not yet know, and some of them doubt the results of these measurements.
Loeb and his colleague Julian Munoz have found an explanation for this anomaly. They suggested that dark matter in the distant past behaved differently than today: some of its atoms could resemble the ions of ordinary matter and have a partial positive or negative charge.
In this case, according to the calculations of cosmologists, modern dark matter will behave in approximately the same way as observations of nearby galaxies show, but in a completely different way affect matter in the first days of the life of the Universe.
Even if the charge of dark matter is quite small, electrical interactions with protons, electrons and other particles that existed before the birth of stars should have slowed them down a lot. As a result, the universe should have cooled down much faster than classical cosmological theories predict.
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The process of this interaction, Loeb notes, left special traces in the radio emission of the first stars, which was recorded by astronomers from the EDGES project, and in the microwave "echo" of the Big Bang.
The authors hope that the search for these vibrations with the help of a new generation of radio telescopes will help to understand whether dark matter can really be charged. The results will either indicate the existence of a "new physics" or return cosmologists to the standard Big Bang model.
