If you look across space with a telescope, you’ll see countless galaxies, most of which host large central black holes, billions of stars and their attendant planets. The universe teems with huge, spectacular objects, and it might seem like these massive objects should hold most of the universe’s matter.

But the Big Bang theory predicts that about 5% of the universe’s contents should be atoms made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Most of those atoms cannot be found in stars and galaxies—a discrepancy that has puzzled astronomers.

If not in visible stars and galaxies, the most likely hiding place for the matter is in the dark space between galaxies. While space is often referred to as a vacuum, it isn’t completely empty. Individual particles and atoms are dispersed throughout the space between stars and galaxies, forming a dark, filamentary network called the “cosmic web.”

A new theory for the origins of dark matter suggests that fast-moving, neutrino-like dark particles could have decoupled from Standard Model particles far earlier than previous theories had suggested.

Through new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Stephen Henrich and Keith Olive at the University of Minnesota proposes that this “ultra-relativistic freeze-out” mechanism could have produced dark matter particles which are almost undetectable, but still compatible with the observed history of the universe.

Despite comprising some 85% of the universe’s total mass, dark matter has never been seen to interact with regular matter except via gravity, making its origins one of the most enduring mysteries in cosmology.

An exploration of the mystery of the impossible neutrino detection and how that might be our first direct detection of dark matter.

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