Could Dark Matter be the d-star Hexaquark?

What is dark matter? Despite making up 80 percent of all matter in the galaxy, we can’t see it, only measure the effects it has on stars and galaxies. Could the d-star hexaquark explain one of the great mysteries of the Cosmos?

By James Maynard

Dark matter was first detected between galaxies by astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the early 1930’s, and within galaxies by Vera Rubin four decades later. Today, we know that this mysterious -something- contains four times as much mass as all the stars, galaxies, planets, and everything else we see in the Cosmos combined. However, despite decades of research, we still don’t understand the nature of dark matter.

Now, researchers at the University of York believe they have a candidate that could explain the underlying nature of this strange substance, a subatomic particle called the d-star hexaquark.

This false-color image of the galaxy cluster Abell 520 shows starlight in orange and hot gas in green, while most of the mass is shown in blue, where normal matter cannot be seen. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Jee (University of California, Davis), and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University)

“The origin of dark matter in the universe is one of the biggest questions in science and one that, until now, has drawn a blank. Our first calculations indicate that condensates of d-stars are a feasible new candidate for dark matter. This new result is particularly exciting since it doesn’t require any concepts that are new to physics,” said Daniel Watts of the University of York.