These are questions I have been contemplating for the last few days after reading about the additional four new elements added to the periodic table of visible matter. Just in case you missed it the new elements are human-engineered and super heavy. They also exist in time frames measured in fractions of a second. Their temporary names:
I’m surprised no one picked unobtainium, the name of the ore being mined on Pandora in the movie Avatar. But that may still happen because naming human-created elements follows a set of unusual rules. You can name them after figures in mythology, after places, countries, specific properties or the names of scientists who discover them. These heavy elements are created by scientists when they smash lighter elements together and analyze the fallout. If the merged atom lasts for a few microseconds, voila, you have a new member for the periodic table which now stands at 118.
Why do we do this? Because scientists, like the happy one pictured below, one who discovered one of the new elements, keep searching for heavier atoms in pursuit of a theoretical stable of super-sized elements forming visible matter.
But what about the matter we cannot see….dark matter? I just finished reading Lisa Randall’s book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. Randall is an expert in theoretical particle physics and a cosmologist. In her book she describes how dark matter dominates the Universe making up more than 80% of all matter. This is matter invisible to us yet we know it exists while not knowing its specific characteristics.
Unlike its name, dark matter isn’t dark. Rather it’s invisible. It’s not antimatter because if it were the interaction with regular matter would annihilate both. In her book Randall describes dark matter as the missing mass that keeps the expanding Universe from flying apart even faster than it is doing today. Gravity is considered too weak a force to explain what astrophysicists decipher from the radio telescopes, scientific satellites, Earth-based experiments and visible light telescopes used today to study the way the Universe works.
Randall theorizes that dark matter could explain past mass extinctions here on Earth. She proposes that the Milky Way, our galaxy, has a thin parallel dark matter companion resident within it that exerts an influence on our Solar System during its oscillations (see image below) while rotating around the galactic centre. The interaction of dark matter with the outer Solar System’s Oort Cloud, she theorizes, sets long period comets on a path to the inner Solar System where they become objects of doom. As her book title suggests, one of those disturbed Oort Cloud objects may have collided with Earth 66 million years ago leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Theorizing about dark matter has a history since the 1930s. But as of yet we have never seen one elementary particle of the stuff. Scientists don’t know whether dark matter is undifferentiated, that is, a single element, or if it has a parallel Universe of elementary particles equal to visible matter.
It is an anthropomorphic view coming from a creature made of visible matter to think that dark matter might not constitute as rich a material environment as our own. After all it makes up 80% of all matter. In the dark matter parallel Universe there may be numerous dark matter elements with dark stars and even dark planets.
Think this sounds crazy? Remember in our world of the visible, even we cannot see the entire spectrum of light. We don’t see radio waves. We can’t see the infrared part of the spectrum. Yet we know that what is invisible to our eyes does exist and we exploit both radio waves and our knowledge of infrared to design tools we use every day.
Solving the dark matter mystery could yield some exciting and surprising discoveries. Even a whole new periodic table of elements with an opportunity to name all of them. Now that may not excite you but I’m betting there are a whole bunch of researchers out there who cannot wait.
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When I was a youngster matter consisted of atoms and a few subatomic particles – protons, neutrons and electrons. As I have grown older physics and chemistry have discovered many additions to matter that include six types of quarks, six types of leptons, twelve different bosons, photons, gluons, W and Z particles and the recently touted Higgs Boson. But when cosmologists, chemists and physicists talk about dark matter they until recently have described it as a single particle. It is akin to being back in my childhood when I first learned about atoms. How is that even plausible? If matter can consist of all kinds of particles why can’t dark matter also be multi-faceted?
A growing consensus on dark matter suggests that it consists of more than one particle just like visible matter. This may explain why no single experiment whether in deep mines or on the International Space Station has captured a signature that all can agree represents the “Ah ha” moment in the search for dark matter.
Earlier this year Harvard physicist, Lisa Randall, along with one of her colleagues presented a new theory which they called double-disk dark matter or DDDM. We in the visible matter world see the shadow universe of dark matter as inert and use that as the explanation for why we have such trouble detecting it. But the DDDM theory paints a very different picture. In it dark matter interacts within its own medium forming dark atoms and a rich dark chemistry and physics, as complex as our world of visible matter.
Randall has remarked in interviews that dark matter may “not be dark with respect to its own light.” In other words, dark matter isn’t dark within itself. Dark matter forms a universe that parallels our visible one. In DDDM there is a dark matter equivalent to our visible Milky Way, (see the contrasting images below). In DDDM there are dark solar systems with dark suns, dark planets and even a dark Earth. Sounds far fetched but what has remained unexplained by results from underground particle detectors suggests – not so much.
