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And of course the main competing hypothesis—which appears to be winning—is WIMPs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles https://en
by Sharlin 7y ago
And of course the main competing hypothesis—which appears to be winning—is WIMPs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_par...
(Note that confusingly, while both are called "massive", the mass of an average MACHO would be somewhere between 50 and 60 orders of magnitude greater than that of a WIMP!)
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoI'm under the impression that WIMP uses "massive" in the sense of "not-massless"?
- Sharlin 7y agoIndeed, though I believe any candidate WIMPs would also have a fairly high mass as far as fundamental particles go, at least on the order of tens of GeV (which is to say tens of times the mass of proton).
- lutorm 7y agoI think they're "massive" in relation to the weakly-interacting-and-very-much-not-massive neutrinos, which were another dark matter candidate.
- twic 7y agoNamed by astronomers, who think carbon is a metal, so what do you expect.