It could be what constitutes dark matter.
Hidden secrets
New research suggests that the universe is full of particles capable of traveling faster than light. Live Science Reports This scenario is considered a “viable alternative” to our current cosmic model.
Sure, the idea is a bit far-fetched, but it's worth hearing about. These hypothetical particles, known as tachyons, are unlikely to be real, but they're not just science fiction. The possibility of their existence is something physicists have been seriously considering for decades, raising fundamental questions about the nature of causality.
As detailed in A The study has not yet been peer-reviewedResearchers hypothesize that tachyons make up dark matter, an unobservable matter that — although its existence is widely considered by scientists to exist, is technically hypothetical — is believed to account for about 85% of all matter in the universe.
Because we can only see the significant gravitational influence of dark matter, we don't know what it actually is He isleaving the door open to all kinds of possibilities worth considering.
Generate a problem
As it turns out, a tachyon-filled universe does a good job of explaining the universe's continuing expansion, according to the researchers.
In the standard cosmological model, the existence of so-called dark energy is used to explain the expansion of the universe. Unobservable dark energy is also thought to dwarf even dark matter, accounting for up to 70 percent of the entire universe.
Without it, the sheer gravity of all the mass in the universe would eventually slow its expansion. Instead, scientists note that the rate of expansion is actually accelerating, driven by hypothesized dark energy.
But if tachyons are real and spread throughout the universe as dark matter, they could also potentially explain this acceleration. The researchers found that in such a scenario, tachyonic dark matter would initially slow the expansion of the universe, before reversing and causing it to accelerate as we see now. They call this “inverted” expansion.
Incomplete match
So far, the evidence to support this comes from observations of Type Ia supernovae, a type of supernova — in which a dying star collapses and explodes — that causes certain types of binary star systems.
These distinctive supernovae act as standard candles, cosmic objects with known luminosity that allow astronomers to use them as a reference point for calculating distances in space. In fact, using Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, scientists confirmed for the first time that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
When the researchers compared their tachyonic model with data from a sample of Type Ia supernovae, they found that the two “fit comfortably with each other.”
Of course, this is a very limited application of the model. It raises interesting possibilities for later research, to be sure, but it is a far cry from proving that tachyons actually exist. However, it shows how much we have left to learn about the fundamental phenomena that govern the universe.
More about cosmology: A new paper claims that dark matter does not exist at all