![]() ![]() To that end, the new study may represent just one step toward a better understanding of the standard model, but Naik concluded that there is also an “interesting wider context” that demands further exploration of “all the places where ΛCDM seems to break down on galaxy scales.Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit After all, the planes of satellites problem is not the only challenge to ΛCDM, and more may well arise in the future. They may inspire additions or corrections to the ΛCDM model, or perhaps even a wholesale replacement of this stalwart physical framework. The answers to these unresolved mysteries are important pieces of the puzzle that is our universe. Naik added that it’s “an open question” whether the hypothetical domain walls would even be stable enough to pass through hulking structures such as the Milky Way or Andromeda galaxies, which is yet another enigma that will have to be addressed in future studies. “What you can then see is whether it is indeed natural for domain walls to form in our Local Group and whether what you have is the formation of these planes.” “What we can do instead is a proper full cosmological simulation, so really start from cosmological initial conditions and simulate the formation of our Local Group or have some system that looks very similar to a Local Group,” he continued. Essentially, this means that as the universe expands, and accordingly becomes less dense, these particles will pass a threshold density that causes them to flip their lowest-energy state of zero to a random positive or negative value. Theories suggest that symmetrons have undergone what’s known as symmetry-breaking mechanisms several times over the course of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year lifespan. “That's the context in which people study theories like symmetron theory-it's a new particle candidate for dark energy and/or dark matter.” “We know that we need new particles because we have dark matter and dark energy and so we suspect that we're going to need to add new particles to our standard model to account for those things,” Naik explained. Naik and Burrage now propose that particles called symmetrons could generate a special force that creates invisible boundaries in space, known as “domain walls.” Symmetrons are one of many speculative particles that have been proposed to fill in some of the missing links in the standard model, Naik said, to help explain the existence of dark matter and dark energy, which is a weird phenomena that appears to be making the universe expand at an accelerated rate. Indeed, Naik and Burrage note that the ΛCDM model is “a fantastically successful paradigm, accounting for a myriad of independent observations on different scales,” but that “problems begin to emerge when one ‘zooms in’ to small scales” of individual galaxies and their satellites,” according to their new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. “When I got to the end of my PhD, I was at a place where I was thinking a lot about these kinds of small-scale challenges to ΛCDM.” “I did my PhD in astronomy and my thesis was looking at galactic dynamics, and thinking about how one can use galactic dynamics to address some fundamental physics problems,” Naik said in a call. Now, a pair of researchers at the University of Nottingham have presented what they believe is “the first potential ‘new physics’ explanation for the observed planes of satellites which does not do away with dark matter,” referring to the unidentified substance that makes up most of the mass in the universe, according to a new study published on the preprint server arXiv.Īneesh Naik, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who led the study, said the novel solution emerged from discussions with his colleagues who study particle physics, including co-author and University of Nottingham physicist Clare Burrage, along with his own expertise as an astrophysicist. Scientists have proposed many possible explanations for this curious gap between theory and observation, known as the “satellite disk problem” or the “planes of satellites problem,” which is one of many small-scale challenges to the ΛCDM model.
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