14 DAY TRIAL // Following new discoveries made in a very large galaxy clusters, experts are now proposing that the emergence of life in the Universe would be extremely difficult without the presence of dark matter.
The stuff, which can only be detected by analyzing the gravitational influence it exerts on normal, baryonic matter, may be responsible for warming billions of worlds to the point where they become capable of supporting basic lifeforms.
In a recent study, experts shows that countless extrasolar planets in the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689 may in fact be rendered habitable not by their proximity to their respective parents stars, but by the effects that dark matter causes.
Abell 1689 is a very large cluster, containing in excess of 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. Around these stars, numerous exoplanets may exist, of which a portion may be heated sufficiently to allow for the existence of liquid water on the surface.
Given the large numbers involved, it may be possible that thousands to millions of inhabitable planets exist in that cluster alone. There is however a limitation to what dark matter can do – its own density.
Experts believe that only high concentrations of dark matter can heat up entire planets. In our own galaxy, such amounts of the stuff can be found closer to the core, around the supermassive black hole that powers the Milky Way's center.
The most interesting implication of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) study is that life may be able to endure without the presence of a star. The study was conducted by physicist Dan Hooper and astrophysicist Jason Steffen.
As such, dark matter-fueled exoplanets may be the life rafts of the Universe, the worlds that continue to endure even after all the lights ran out in the Cosmos.
“I imagine 10 trillion years in the future, when the universe has expanded beyond recognition and all the stars in our galaxy have long since burnt out, the only planets with any heat are these here,” Hooper explains.
“[...] I could imagine that any civilization that survived over this huge stretch of time would start moving to these dark-matter-fueled planets,” he concludes, quoted by Daily Galaxy.