Dark photons' at Big Bang's cosmic dawn could shine a light on dark matter

Wouldn't "dark photons" provide the means for "dark matter" to shed energy and cool off?

Doesn't that run counter to some of the explanations about why dark matter does not condense like ordinary matter, which are used to explain "dark matter halo" etc. needed to explain why it is distributed differently than regular matter in galaxies and smaller scale astronomy observables?
 
Jan 6, 2025
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Interactions between dark matter and dark photons during a "missing chapter" cosmic history could shed light on one of the most troubling cosmic mysteries.

Dark photons' at Big Bang's cosmic dawn could shine a light on dark matter : Read more
I am not suggesting they are wrong, but I have my doubts they are 100% correct. There is clear evidence for galaxies to have formed within only a few hundred million years of the big bang, and we are finding evidence that supermassive black holes already existed in the heart of many of these first galaxies, having read their paper, mathematically they need to play with it and take into account research published since they submitted their paper - which was in early 2024, only being published in November 2024, about 9 months after submission.

However, their work is elegant and the maths fit, but only with the data and assumtions they made or had available at that time, I suspect that in the coming years we will see a flury of similar work from the same team and other collaborators that will be based on the lastest data from JWST research into those first 500 million years.
 
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Science or mythology? In mythology, one can create as many mythical characters as required. Can we do that in science? Now it is dark photon, tomorrow it will be something else. Better we leave it to creationists to explain everything in physics.
Some hundred years ago, physicists opened a Pandora's box. Out came, QM and GR along with a stream of creatures namely, massless particles, mass-giving particles, virtual particles, antiparticles, spacetime, dark matter, dark energy, and so on. Let us wait for the last one, the fairy which will drive away all those mischievous creatures.
 
To the extent that QM and GR are successful in quantitatively predicting observable effects, I would not call them "mythology".

But, what they are not is "explanations" of why those effects occur. And, where they fall short in that regard, there are plenty of people engaging in what may turn out to be more mythology than basic understanding.
 
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To the extent that QM and GR are successful in quantitatively predicting observable effects, I would not call them "mythology".

But, what they are not is "explanations" of why those effects occur. And, where they fall short in that regard, there are plenty of people engaging in what may turn out to be more mythology than basic understanding.
A Scientific Theory is the "best guess" we have based on mathematics, observations, experiementation, predictions and a helpful spoonful of guestimation. Anyone that tells you that any theory is a fact does not understand science, and any person who states a hypothesis is a theory, does not under science either.

Lets look at this shall we.

1. Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a tentative explanation or prediction that can be tested through observation or experimentation. It is the starting point of the scientific method. A good hypothesis is -
  • Testable: It can be examined through experiments or observations.
  • Falsifiable: There must be a potential to prove it wrong if it's incorrect.
For example, "Plants grow faster when exposed to red light than blue light" is a hypothesis that can be tested by experiments.

2. Theory
A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that -
  • Is based on a body of evidence collected through repeated observation and experimentation.
  • Incorporates facts, laws, and tested hypotheses to provide a cohesive explanation.
  • Has predictive power and can be used to explain and predict phenomena.
Theories are not immutable; they can be refined, modified, or replaced as new evidence emerges. Importantly, a theory is not a "guess" or "hunch" in scientific terms. For example, the theory of evolution or the germ theory of disease are robust scientific theories supported by extensive evidence.

3. Law
A scientific law describes a relationship or principle that consistently holds true under specific conditions, often expressed mathematically. Laws -
  • Describe "what" happens in nature rather than "why" it happens.
  • Are based on repeated experiments and observations that confirm their validity.
Unlike theories, laws don't explain phenomena—they summarize patterns or behaviors observed in nature. For instance:
  • Newton's Laws of Motion describe how objects behave when forces act on them.
  • The Law of Conservation of Mass states that mass is conserved in a closed system during a chemical reaction.
Key Distinctions:
  • Hypothesis: A proposed explanation yet to be rigorously tested.
  • Theory: A thoroughly tested and widely accepted explanation of phenomena.
  • Law: A concise statement describing consistent patterns in nature, often without explaining why.
Laws are generally thought of as "immutable" in that laws consistently describe phenomena within their applicable context. However, they are not absolute; they can be superseded or modified if new evidence or broader understanding comes to light (e.g., Newtonian mechanics is a "law" that works well in most everyday contexts but is superseded by Einstein's theory of relativity in extreme conditions).
 
"Jim Franklin", It seems like you just changed "finiter's" categorization of QM and RT from "mythology" to "theory".

So, why quote me instead of him? I don't need the lecture on the distinctions between the words in your post.

What you should be addressing is your distinction between your "spoonful of guestimation" and his label of "mythology" for the same concepts.
 
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"Jim Franklin", It seems like you just changed "finiter's" categorization of QM and RT from "mythology" to "theory".

So, why quote me instead of him? I don't need the lecture on the distinctions between the words in your post.

What you should be addressing is your distinction between your "spoonful of guestimation" and his label of "mythology" for the same concepts.
I quoted your post because of the words you used that may not have clarified the subject matter for those reading your comments. It is very clear, that many on these boards to not understand how science works and the difference between hypothesis, theory and a law within science. It was not necessarilly directed at you personally.
 
OK, but where do you stand on the "spoonful of guestimation" vs "mythology"?

Probably best to focus your response on the concept of "dark photons", which is supposed to be the subject of this thread.
 
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OK, but where do you stand on the "spoonful of guestimation" vs "mythology"?

Probably best to focus your response on the concept of "dark photons", which is supposed to be the subject of this thread.
All science has a "spoonful of guestimation" in it when you are dealing with anything that is not an absolute, whether that be archeology, paleontology or quantum theory - there is a lot we do not know, and may never know (especially for the first two) and so some educated guesses have to be made based on the information we do have and can confirm.

My earlier response in this made my position clear.
I am not suggesting they are wrong, but I have my doubts they are 100% correct. There is clear evidence for galaxies to have formed within only a few hundred million years of the big bang, and we are finding evidence that supermassive black holes already existed in the heart of many of these first galaxies, having read their paper, mathematically they need to play with it and take into account research published since they submitted their paper - which was in early 2024, only being published in November 2024, about 9 months after submission.

However, their work is elegant and the maths fit, but only with the data and assumtions they made or had available at that time, I suspect that in the coming years we will see a flury of similar work from the same team and other collaborators that will be based on the lastest data from JWST research into those first 500 million years.
 
As I posted in reply #2

Wouldn't "dark photons" provide the means for "dark matter" to shed energy and cool off?

Doesn't that run counter to some of the explanations about why dark matter does not condense like ordinary matter, which are used to explain "dark matter halo" etc. needed to explain why it is distributed differently than regular matter in galaxies and smaller scale astronomy observables?
 
I would argue that the present matter and energy inventories are way off base. Forget about the CMBR.

I look at this cosmos in a different manner.

I believe that stars are destroyers of matter, not an assembler of matter.

Stars disassemble, disassociate dipoles and atoms. And cast the undetectable and un-interacable matter out thru the cosmos. Stars nullify matter.

Stars entropy matter.
 
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I think people are conflating unrelated topics - and science is to blame for that.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are not connected, at no point has any scientific paper ever linked the two and people should not think they are linked - especially as the latest research by Antonia Seifert, Zachary G Lane, Marco Galoppo, Ryan Ridden-Harper, David L Wiltshire, "Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models" published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 537, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages L55–L60 has now cast doubt on this and provided a rational, to be proven, explanation of why Dark Energy is not required to explain the expansion of the Universe.
 
I believe that spacetime, space expansion, just like anti-matter, is a measurement illusion.

A measurement illusion is when the measurement result is accurate, but the explanation is nonsensical. Like a contradiction or a paradox. There are no such things.

That demonstrates that one or more postulates you are working with....... is an error.
 
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Dark Energy and Dark Matter are not connected, at no point has any scientific paper ever linked the two and people should not think they are linked - especially as the latest research by Antonia Seifert, Zachary G Lane, Marco Galoppo, Ryan Ridden-Harper, David L Wiltshire, "Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models" published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 537, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages L55–L60 has now cast doubt on this and provided a rational, to be proven, explanation of why Dark Energy is not required to explain the expansion of the Universe.
Well, that position is not really defensible, considering that we have no actual knowledge about what either dark matter nor dark energy really is, or even proof that either exists.

Believing in one paper among hundreds of dissimilar ones is not scientific method.

There are a lot of speculative attempts at different interpretations of observations, and I would not bet the house on any of them. I just note that they are not all going towards the same conclusions.

As for "no papers" linking the 2, here is one: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2018/12/aa32898-18/aa32898-18.html titled "A unifying theory of dark energy and dark matter: Negative masses and matter creation within a modified ΛCDM framework". Not saying it is correct. Just demonstrating that there is some scientific discussion going on.

And, yes, I know that we have not found any negative masses, yet, either. I even know that CERN recently did some measurements that seem to show that antimatter has positive mass, not negative mass. Not sure of the assumptions that went into that analysis, thought.

My point is that some theories have grown so full of concepts that are not actually proven, and rely on so many fitting parameters that have unexplained physics, that I can understand why some will compare it to mythology. What is the real difference between Zeus ordering the universe to expand and dark energy causing it to expand - just anthropomorphism. And, it seems that dark energy is even able to "change its mind" about what is does and doesn't do over cosmological history. Yes, I know that some are trying to talk about "inflation", "early dark energy" and just plain "dark energy" as if they are somehow 3 different things. But, they are all just fitting parameters that counteract the known forces. The use of 3 different ones of the same basic type at 3 different times to make a coherent theory tends to make me think that theory needs more "help" than it deserves.
 
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Well, that position is not really defensible, considering that we have no actual knowledge about what either dark matter nor dark energy really is, or even proof that either exists.
Who said it was defensible, I simply pointed out facts as we know them today. I have not really stated whether I believe or accept dark energy, dark matter, the toothfairy or even Unicorns. You really need to read what is written and not interpret it to suit your thought process.

As for Dark Matter - well, unless the standard model has some surprises and gravity theories are wholly wrong, which let me state right now I know they are not - but may need a tweak, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests that 26% of the mass in the Universe is in a form we are unable to detect.

Recently, CERN announced the discovery of three new type of particles, a pentaquark and the first pair ever of tetraquarks - which does also include a new type of tetraquark. Take a lolok at this video by a friend of mine, Dr David Darling.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvsYzUJtKxw


We are finding new information about the particles we know about all the time, take a look at this video from NASA Space News about new discoveries of the Higgs Boson.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj-5gtyxw4s

Believing in one paper among hundreds of dissimilar ones is not scientific method.
You are assuming I accept their findings without question, I question everything. I accept their paper, but that does not mean they have the answer.

Please listen to this video by one of the researchers who wrote the papers, Dr Ryan Ridden. He explains their findings in a way the average, reasonably intelligent and physics aware person should understand.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhlPDvAdSMw


Take a listen to what Dr David Kipping has to say on this.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE_xLGgZzFI



There are a lot of speculative attempts at different interpretations of observations, and I would not bet the house on any of them. I just note that they are not all going towards the same conclusions.
On that we agree, in 300 years I'll bet a lot of currently accepted theories will have either been superceded by new discoveries rewriting our understanding, or they will be so modified that that may as well be a different theory. That is how scientific advances are made and understanding improved.
As for "no papers" linking the 2, here is one: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2018/12/aa32898-18/aa32898-18.html titled "A unifying theory of dark energy and dark matter: Negative masses and matter creation within a modified ΛCDM framework". Not saying it is correct. Just demonstrating that there is some scientific discussion going on.
Interesting find, not on my usual list of peer reviewed publications that I read - there are only so many hours in a day - but it is interesting that this is the only paper - I did a papers search using Chat GPT, and several other LLM programs - ChatGPT did not find the paper you linked too, but the other did, and that was the only one they found with the exception of a "letter" that was on this topic. That the abstract starts off with a statistical mistake is concerning, especially as this was not picked up and corrected before publication, but whilst their paper raises some interesting questions, ultimately, they are incorrect, as has been shown by research completed following this paper publication. Nice find though.
And, yes, I know that we have not found any negative masses, yet, either. I even know that CERN recently did some measurements that seem to show that antimatter has positive mass, not negative mass. Not sure of the assumptions that went into that analysis, thought.
Antimatter does not “fall up”, as some thought it might, but rather responds to the gravity in the same way as normal matter. That is the conclusion of physicists working on the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN, who have made the first direct observation of free-falling antimatter atoms.

The experiment helps rule out the idea that a difference in their responses to gravity is somehow responsible for the fact that there is much more matter than antimatter in the visible universe. However, the measurement still leaves open the tantalizing, but very unlikely, possibility that antimatter and matter react slightly differently to gravity.

Antimatter was first predicted in 1928 and four years later the first antimatter particles – anti-electrons, or positrons – were observed in the lab. The question over whether anti-matter reacted normally, or differently to gravity has been a question since Paul Dirac predicted it in 1928. Antimatter particles appear to be identical to their matter counterparts, but with their charge, parity and time reversed. So far, studies of antiparticles suggest that they have the same masses as their counterparts and that they respond to gravity in the same way. The experiments as CERN has proved this to be correct.

If you wish to understand this experiement and its impact more, then here is a link to the paper


My point is that some theories have grown so full of concepts that are not actually proven, and rely on so many fitting parameters that have unexplained physics, that I can understand why some will compare it to mythology. What is the real difference between Zeus ordering the universe to expand and dark energy causing it to expand - just anthropomorphism. And, it seems that dark energy is even able to "change its mind" about what is does and doesn't do over cosmological history. Yes, I know that some are trying to talk about "inflation", "early dark energy" and just plain "dark energy" as if they are somehow 3 different things. But, they are all just fitting parameters that counteract the known forces. The use of 3 different ones of the same basic type at 3 different times to make a coherent theory tends to make me think that theory needs more "help" than it deserves.
Look, the term Dark Energy, was coined in 1998 by University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner. He was looking for the cause of the expansion of the Universe after the big bang. To give you some idea of how our knowledge and idea have evolved, here is a paper on the content of the Universe by Michael that was published some 24 years ago, Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe (Michael S Turner 2000 Phys. Scr. 2000 210).

Over the years a number of researchers have attempted to link Dark Energy and Dark Matter, without any conclusive success, taking into account the paper cited above on the "Timescape" theory, if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that Timescape is right in many aspects, but some Dark Energy still exists, then a link to Dark Matter may be more credible and sustainable. One of the problems in the general misunderstanding people have about Dark Matter - eventually we will find out what it is - then it will not longer be Dark Matter - because we will have not onbly proved it exists, but we will know what it is, even if our telescopes do not pick it up, we do pick up its gravitational effects and we may find ways to "illuminate" it so we can detect it - in much the same way we use special equipment to detect X rays, Gamma rays, electrons etc etc.

Now I cannot tell you what that Dark Matter is, my post above gives some speculation as to what it could be, in reality, it may be a bit of all of it and some things we have not even thought of, only continued research will move the needle forward on this.

What I would strongly suggest is that you do not make assumptions about a person's thoughts on a subject unless they specifically state they do or do not believe something. I sit on the fence with a lot of these subjects, the maths often works out, which does suggest something needs investigation, but that does not make it correct either, even if people are publishing good research.
 

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