Dark matter could be made up of ultralight dark photons that heated up our universe: this is a new scenario proposed in a study recently published in the scientific journal “Physical Review Letters”. This hypothesis, the authors say, is in excellent agreement with observations made by the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph (COS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope, which takes measurements of the “cosmic web”, the complex and tenuous network of filaments that fills the space between galaxies.
The data collected by COS suggest that the cosmic intergalactic filaments are hotter than predictions from hydrodynamical simulations of the standard model of structure formation. “Since dark photons would be able to convert into low-frequency photons and heat up the cosmic structures,” the scientists explain “they could well explain the experimental information”. The study has been carried out by SISSA researchers in collaboration with researchers at Tel Aviv, Nottingham and New York Universities.
(Image by Dr Ewald Puchwein and the Sherwood-Relics collaboration)