DARK MATTER

by Lavinia Kumar

The early Universe was a strange place. Early in its history—in the first quintillionth of a second—the entire cosmos was nothing more than a stunningly hot plasma. And, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this soup of quarks and gluons was accompanied by the formation of weird little primordial black holes (PHBs). It’s entirely possible that these long-vanished PHBs could have been the root of dark matter. MIT’s David Kaiser and graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve suggest that such early super-charged black holes were very likely a new state of matter that we don’t see in the modern cosmos. “Even though these short-lived, exotic creatures are not around today, they could have affected cosmic history in ways that could show up in subtle signals today,” Kaiser said. “Within the idea that all dark matter could be accounted for by black holes, this gives us new things to look for.” That means a new way to search for the origins of dark matter. (Graphic: Depiction of a primordial black hole forming amid a sea of hot, color-charged quarks and gluons, a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang.) —Universe Today, June 17, 2024

The British gentry are old hands at dark matter,

invisible behind those large gates,

lengthy curved lanes lined by trees

that lead to rumors of manors, 

over-trimmed gardens, and shootable 

deer, duck, and pheasant.

 

A lesser Brit, Stephen Hawking, created

a jigsaw of calculations, found 

what he thought must be the dark matter

in those hidden places—hiding thirty percent

of universe’s riches in those exotic 

out-of-the-way spaces.

 

But now, two scientists agree with him,

have found the hidden more interesting 

than plebian places, like village houses,

like quarks glued together by gluons.  

And, as is proper for dukes, princes, and lords,

each dark piece is far away from another,

with much space between.

 

But, alas, other nosy scientists, stars 

in our universe, are now spying on this matter, 

to find why, how, such riches were achieved.  

And who wouldn’t?   Will it lead to equality?

Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is a reprinting of her short book Beauty. Salon. Art. 

HERE COMES SUSY

by Marilyn Peretti

Large Hadron Collider Gears Up to Go Beyond Boundaries of Human Understanding —Newsweek headline, April 7, 2015

Have you been looking for your gluino
to glue your quarks together,
or have you hoped for a tiny photino
for your particle of light, the photon?

Or if you’re shopping for a squark
to partner with your darling quark—
building blocks of your lovely atoms’
minute protons and neutrons—

you’ve come to the right place,
to the monster Large Hadron Collider
which will be spinning even faster,
having taken two short years of rest after

rushing in circles to collide particles,
smashing out brand new ones—
as predicted by Mr. Higgs—
decaying into little fermions,

particles of matter, and the bosons
which convey a lotta force.
Ah, we’re getting closer to dark matter.
But does it matter? Do we really need

to understand what binds the galaxies
together in the skies?
Just as we found antimatter,
next comes supersymmetric matter.

Now, doubling its collision energy
supersymmetry, or Susy, will fill in gaps,
showing each particle to have
much more massive partners:

the photon’s photino,
the quark’s squark,
the gluon’s gluino,
and dark matter’s neutralino.

Until then, I think I’ll take a nap.


Marilyn Peretti writes with Chicago’s west suburban poets. She has published Let Wings Take You, To Remember-To Hope, Lichen-Poems of Nature and Angel’s Wings. Her poems have been published in Talking River, Fox Cry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, California Quarterly, PoetrySky, Kyoto Journal and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize.

THE ASTROPHYSICIST TALKS ABOUT DARK MATTER

by Lewis Gardner

Image source: “How close are we to finding dark matter?” by Jim Al-Khalili, Light & Dark, BBC Four, 18 November 2013

The astrophysicist talks about dark matter
and how it must exist although it hasn't been found,
and I remember hearing that this universe


may be only one of an infinite number of universes,
and then I think that,
despite that practically unimaginable vastness,


we usually think about how much fiber we need to eat daily
and how will we find the money to pay the tax bill
and where did I leave the tack hammer


and how we touched each other
that night in February
years ago.

Lewis Gardner shares verse, fiction, and plays at gardnerspeaks.wordpress.com .