INTERESTING ENGINEERING - A study suggests that exoplanets could be used to search for dark matter — the elusive substance that makes up 85% of the universe’s matter.
Dark matter’s gravitational pull proves it exists, but we’ve never been able to directly find it.
Now, the University of California, Riverside study proposes that exoplanets, especially large, gaseous ones like Jupiter, could act as natural laboratories for dark matter search.
The researchers theorize that “superheavy non-annihilating” dark matter particles could gradually collect in the cores of these planets over time.
“If the dark matter particles are heavy enough and don’t annihilate, they may eventually collapse into a tiny black hole,” said Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr, first author and a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.