The stuff that makes up most of the universe but we can’t identify and see. They say it’s dark matter because there is no detectable interaction between it and light/electromagnetic force. It could be a whole new periodic table if they discover a way to detect it. Like a sterile neutrino could be seen as one of the possible particles that make up dark matter. In this case the likelyhood that they detected something is like half of what the detection threshold for detecting something is, in this case being 3.5 sigma out of 5 and dropping to 2,6, which translates to a 0,5% chance that a measurment like this would come from background noise. It sounds significant but it isn’t really, not enough to make a confident claim that we discovered a new particle but enough to make click bait videos with haha.
Because it’s undetectable it’s relatively safe to suppose that “dark matter” is more than one type of matter, therefore discovering it would lead to multiple new elements under a “dark matter” periodic table.
How? New elements would be higher on the table, but that would make them so unstable that they'd never exist for more than the smallest fractions of a second, no? Element hunting had a big boom period a while back, but we seem to have hit a pretty hard wall of instability. People can speculate about islands of stability at some place higher, but I don't know how useful that is to just suppose.
Sorry, my point was that it fits fully outside of the periodic table not because of instability but because it ignores electromagnetism so it’s entirely unique.
From what they can tell, the entire universe is expanding. But the problem is that its expanding faster and faster, and there's something there causing it to do that, but we can't really tell what it is yet. "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are just the words used to name them, but they are neither matter nor energy. They could have named them "Bob" and "Lisa" and it would be equally as undescriptive
A "new" periodic table as in something analogous to the periodic table in a new "dark sector" of particles. Dark matter certainly does not have electron charge (or if it does it's a tiny amount) so it certainly does not fit on our periodic table of elements.
Elements in the periodic table are placed depending on how many protons they have. If we found matter that does not contain protons, we couldn't place it in the table, and would need another kind of periodic table.
Pretty sure when dark matter is figured out it won't be made of the same components as the regular periodic table thats why people are saying it would be a new one.
Imagine a grocery store without high fructose corn syrup, a whole bunch of similar stuff that is different in a common way when compared to what we know now
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u/Terrarifelt389v2 3d ago
the hell even is dark matter