Our Universe Has No Dark Matter, New Research Suggests

A new study from the University of Ottawa shakes up our understanding of the universe. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the study challenges what we thought we knew about the universe’s makeup.

The existing idea says it’s made of normal matter, dark energy, and dark matter. However, this new study says there might not be any dark matter at all.

In cosmology, “dark matter” refers to stuff that doesn’t seem to interact with light or electromagnetic fields.

We can’t see it, and we don’t know what it’s made of, but it helps us figure out how galaxies, planets, and stars move and behave because of its gravitational pull, according to Phys.org.

Existing beliefs say that the universe is 27% of dark matter

Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science, came to this conclusion by using a model that blends two theories: covarying coupling constants (CCC) and “tired light” (TL).

The CCC+TL model combines ideas about how natural forces change over time in the cosmos and how light loses energy during long travels.

This model has been put to the test and has been found to align with various observations, like the distribution of galaxies and the evolution of light from the early universe.

This new finding challenges our current understanding of the universe. The prevailing idea says about 27% of the universe is made of dark matter, with less than 5% being ordinary matter, and the rest is dark energy.

The universe doesn’t need dark matter to exist

Gupta explains that the earlier research on the age of the universe, titled ‘JWST early universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology,’ showed it to be 26.7 billion years old. This new study confirms that the universe doesn’t need dark matter to exist.

He added that in typical cosmology, the universe’s accelerated expansion is attributed to dark energy. However, it’s actually because the natural forces weaken as the universe expands, not because of dark energy.

‘Redshifts’ occur when light shifts towards the redder end of the spectrum. The researcher looked into recent studies regarding how galaxies are dispersed at low redshifts and examined older literature concerning the size of the sound horizon at higher redshifts.

“There are several papers that question the existence of dark matter, but mine is the first one, to my knowledge, that eliminates its cosmological existence while being consistent with key cosmological observations that we have had time to confirm,” says Gupta.

The new study questions dark matter’s role, offers a new model, and sparks exploration into the universe’s fundamental properties, according to Phys.org.