Cosmologists and Astrophysicists Contemplate the Super-Electron

August 30, 2004

Scaled-Up Darkness

Could a single dark matter particle be light-years wide?
By George Musser

In 1996 Discover magazine ran an April Fools' story about giant
particles called "bigons" that could be responsible for all sorts of
inexplicable phenomena. Now, in a case of life imitating art, some
physicists are proposing that the universe's mysterious dark matter
consists of great big particles, light-years or more across. Amid the
jostling of these titanic particles, ordinary matter ekes out its
existence like shrews scurrying about the feet of the dinosaurs.

This idea arose to explain a puzzling fact about dark matter: although
it clumps on the vastest scales, creating bodies such as galaxy
clusters, it seems to resist clumping on smaller scales. Astronomers see
far fewer small galaxies and subgalactic gas clouds than a simple
extrapolation from clusters would imply. Accordingly, many have
suggested that the particles that make up dark matter interact with one
another like molecules in a gas, generating a pressure that
counterbalances the force of gravity.

Mo
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...CB83414B7F0000