Big Bang created everything. Or did it? Physicists propose a second ‘Dark Big Bang’

Dark matter — an invisible entity that makes up much of the universe — has long been one of the most puzzling subjects for astrophysicists.

The term was coined by a Swiss astronomer in 1933 to describe hidden matter that appeared responsible for the peculiar movement of celestial bodies. Since then, scientists have disagreed on the properties and origins of the mysterious element.

“We don’t know what it is. It’s a 90-year-old problem,” Katherine Freese, the director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, told McClatchy News.

But a new theory, posited by Freese and her colleague, Martin Wolfgang Winkler, aims to explain where dark matter came from. In a study published in February, the pair hypothesized that a second big bang — a “Dark Big Bang” — brought dark matter into existence.

“People generally assume that (the Big Bang) created everything, but we realized we don’t have any evidence for the creation of dark matter,” Freese said. “Instead of just assuming everything is created at once, we wanted to investigate; can we have this second Big Bang? And the answer is yes.”

Their pioneering theory proposes that dark and visible matter are in fact “completely decoupled” aside from their connection through gravity.

The theory is born out of a fundamental discrepancy between dark matter and other elements in the universe: Dark matter is significantly younger than the other particles, including photons and quarks, meaning its genesis may have come after the Big Bang.