The universe may have produced dark matter in the first few minutes of the Big Bang, according to new research. Those particles then got trapped into ultradense pockets. Some of those pockets splintered off to become black holes, which then dissolved into a shower of multiple dark matter particle "species," creating a "dark matter periodic table" of invisible elements, the study authors suggest.
Physicists still struggle to explain dark matter — the mysterious, invisible form of matter that makes up the vast majority of the universe's mass. While cosmologists and astronomers have identified circumstantial evidence for the existence of dark matter, from the rotation rates of stars within galaxies to the largest structures visible in the cosmos, they have not identified exactly what the dark matter is.
