We have learned a lot about the universe over the years, but there is a lot more that we don’t know. In addition, many of the things that scientists believe to be true of the universe may not be accurate at all.
A new paper, for example, is having some scientists question what dark matter and dark energy, two things that have become widely accepted as real recently, are made up of.
It is important to note that this paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but that does not mean that it is not accurate. It just has a lot of obstacles and testing to go through before it can be confirmed (or more likely with this type of thing, proven incorrect).
In the paper, the researchers claim that tachyons make up dark matter.
If the claim is correct, it would go a long way toward explaining why the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down.
The paper explains that with a tachyon-based dark matter, the universe would have initially decelerated and then reversed course and started to accelerate. They describe this process as an inflected expansion.
The evidence in support of this claim comes from observations of a special type of supernova known as a Type Ia supernova, which occurs when a dying star collapses and explodes.
This type of supernova has been used before to show that the universe is actually accelerating. It is useful because of the fact that scientists have a good understanding of the luminosity of these events.
If this paper does show to be true, it won’t upend most current models of the universe. The paper describes the claim as:
“similar but not identical to that of now-standard CDM models dominated by dark energy. The features of the tachyonic model can be extracted by fitting the redshift-distance relation of the model to data obtained by treating Type Ia supernovae as standard candles.”
The data gathered fits well with the theory using tachyons, which is promising. One interesting thing that will have a major impact in physics, however, is that tachyons (if real) travel faster than light.
This would obviously change the way we think about many things in the universe.
A lot of additional research will need to be done on this subject, but it is always good to see new ideas being presented, especially when they challenge the accepted theories.
Very interesting theory, but…
I thought nothing could travel faster than light.