"Whereas we're fully aware of the full suite of Standard Model particles - quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antiparticles, plus the photon, the gluons, the W-and-Z bosons, and the Higgs boson - dark matter must be composed of something else entirely: something novel and not yet directly detected."
"If dark matter is real, and if it dominates the matter content of the Universe, then there should be large numbers of satellite galaxies, small and low-mass collections of a few stars but mostly dark matter, all throughout intergalactic space. When those galaxies form stars from their normal matter, the low amount of total mass means that most of the gas within those galaxies should get expelled, leaving only a small population of stars embedded within a relatively large amount of dark matter."
"In order to explain the cosmic structures we see, from the CMB to individual galaxies to galaxy clusters and even the grand cosmic web, dark matter must not only be present, but must dominate the total matter content of the Universe."
Dark matter represents a mysterious component of the Universe composed of particles beyond the Standard Model. Despite knowing all Standard Model particles—quarks, leptons, neutrinos, photons, gluons, and bosons—dark matter remains undetected yet necessary to explain cosmic structures from the cosmic microwave background to galaxy clusters and the cosmic web. Dark matter must comprise the majority of the Universe's matter content. However, dark matter theory predicts numerous satellite galaxies throughout intergalactic space: small, low-mass collections dominated by dark matter with expelled gas and few stars. These "almost dark" galaxies have been observed but yielded little insight until the recent discovery of CDG-2 (candidate dark galaxy-2), which presents new implications for understanding dark matter's existence and properties.
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