As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, researchers have now proposed a model where it is produced before the Big Bang.

According to Freese and Winkler, however, a Dark Big Bang is consistent with the evidence for dark matter – as long as it happened promptly, within about a month of the first Big Bang.

Energy transition Dark matter may have been created after the Big Bang, something that could soon be tested by gravitational wave detectors. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Tomertu) New constraints on a theory that says dark matter was created just after the Big Bang  – rather than at the Big Bang – have been determined by Richard Casey and  Cosmin Ilie at Colgate University in the US.

After almost a century of speculation, proposals and searches for dark matter, physicists now know that it currently comprises about 27% of the universe's mass-energy, with an abundance over five times that of ordinary matter like you,

The big cosmic joke of dark matter is that, although we can’t see it, it apparently makes up the vast majority of all the matter in the universe. We literally can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re also not sure when and where it came from.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey ’24 have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.