COULD bizarre giant particles nearly as big as galaxies, but lighter than electrons, dig cosmology out of a hole? Physicists suggest the Universe is jam-packed with these strange particles, which might explain why small galaxies are far rarer in the Universe than theory predicts.
"I know it sounds crazy," says team member Andrei Gruzinov of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. "But so far as we can tell, no observations rule it out."
The weird particles could solve a problem related to galaxy formation. Observations suggest galaxies formed when the Universe was less than a billion years old as matter clumped together under gravity. But astronomers have trouble explaining how they formed so early on. The normal matter that makes up galaxies and stars should have taken much longer to collapse into lumps.
To resolve this, they've suggested the Universe contains lots of so-called cold dark matter, ...
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