Physicists Identify Possible New Particle Behind Dark Matter

sciencehabit writes: Like cops tracking the wrong person, physicists seeking to identify dark matter — the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to bind the galaxies — may have been stalking the wrong particle. In fact, a particle with some properties opposite to those of physicists' current favorite dark matter candidate — the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP — would do just as good a job at explaining the stuff, a quartet of theorists says. Hypothetical strongly interacting massive particles — or SIMPs — would also better account for some astrophysical observations, they argue.

Comments

s/Identify/Hypothesize/

[mcelrath]

No one has "identified" anything. This is a paper with a proposal, an idea, a hypothesis. Behind it lie a rather gigantic pile of assumptions and parameters to fit the data. It's long been speculated that Dark Matter may not be simple, but rather could be as complicated as the visible spectrum (which contains electrons, photons, atoms, and the entire periodic table). But there's a huge problem with making predictions in a strongly interacting theory: you generally can't. "Strong interactions" mean that most computations do not converge. For instance we cannot, from first principles, calculate the mass of any atomic nuclei.

So this means the "dark matter sector" contains essentially a whole periodic table of stuff, and we're hopelessly unable to compute anything. This paper in particular ignores the possibility of bound states (e.g. atoms, mesons, etc) in the dark matter sector, which IMHO is just silly especially with strong interactions.

Re:There is no such thing as dark matter

[MightyMartian]

So your postulation is that a theory which explains an enormous number of observations must be wrong because one group of observations... er, wait, what the hell are you saying?