Is dark matter sterile? That’s one idea recently presented at the National Astronomy Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society this week.
And the Number Shall Be Three
In earlier posts about dark matter, I’ve written about how neutrinos would seem to be a good candidate, but there simply aren’t enough of them to account for all of dark matter. As far as we can tell, there are three types (flavors) of neutrinos, and we know the upper limit of their mass from the distribution of galaxies in the universe. So the three known neutrino flavors can’t be the solution to dark matter.
Not Like the Others
The nature of dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries in modern astrophysics. Actually that isn’t quite true. We do know of one type of dark matter, and we’ve even detected this dark matter in experiments on Earth. This particular type of dark matter is more commonly known as neutrinos.