Richard Goering
Centennial, Colorado
Neutrinos as physicists perceive them can not represent dark matter. The Normal Mannequin explains how the fundamental constructing blocks — basic particles — and three of the 4 identified forces created the universe. Basic particles are subatomic particles that don’t encompass another particle; electrons are an instance, and so are neutrinos.
What guidelines neutrinos out of the working for dark matter is that within the Normal Mannequin, they’re thought of “sizzling” particles, which means they journey at speeds near the velocity of sunshine. For a particle to represent dark matter, it should be “chilly,” or journey slowly in comparison with mild.
The main function dark matter performed within the formation of the universe was to clump itself up into giant plenty, whose gravity then attracted common matter, forming the large-scale constructions of the universe. If dark matter have been sizzling, the particles would have been shifting too quick to create these clumps, which means there can be no galaxies (no less than, not on the scales we observe them). We nonetheless observe these dark matter clumps, or dark matter halos, surrounding galaxies.
One other facet of neutrinos that guidelines them out as dark matter candidates is that they aren’t truly invisible — no less than, not in the best way that physicists outline it. When a scientist refers to an invisible particle, it often means a collision with one other particle has by no means been noticed. However researchers have seen neutrinos work together with different particles by the weak power.
Hopefully dark matter isn’t absolutely invisible; in any other case we might by no means detect it immediately by “seeing” it. And since dark matter has been confirmed to work together gravitationally, astronomers and particle physicists are hopeful that it has some extremely suppressed interactions but to be seen.
Kaliroe Pappas
Graduate Pupil, Laboratory of Nuclear Science, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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