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+--- Thread: MagHydrogen as Dark Matter? (/showthread.php?tid=3844)
MagHydrogen as Dark Matter? - SeanR - 11-04-2018
I was watching Isaac Arthur's video, from Season 2, on Dark Matter. In it, he mentions the key theories for what comprises Dark Matter.
I had a wild hair. What are the chances of mag-hydrogen being the Dark Matter?
I mean, in-setting, magmatter is mostly non-reactive with normal matter, such that you have to bond it to a magnetic element, (and bond a magnetic mag-matter element at that,) in order to do much with it. It does destroy matter, in setting, if they cross, but that's been thrown around for awhile, with the current version being less destructive than the earlier version when bound into something resembling atomic matter. This, to me, suggests there may be enough more play that it could be completely non-interactive.
Further, my, admittedly, limited understanding would have pretty much nothing but hydrogen forming from the Big Bang itself, with the heavier elements being the result of stellar death since then. If mag-hydrogen failed to fuse, there'd not being any mag-stars, so there'd be no mag-helium, or mag-iron either.
Basically, does this fit?
RE: MagHydrogen as Dark Matter? - stevebowers - 11-04-2018
In cosmology, one candidate for dark matter is monopolium. This is usually imagined as a monopole/antimonopole pair, but if the sort of charge relationships that we imagine for magmatter are possible, then we can consider magmatter as a subset of the possible types of monopolium. There have been a number of studies of the prospects of monopolium as a dark matter candidate, so we can look at them to see how they measure up. Unfortunately, these studies mostly conclude that monopolium, as a tiny, dense, neutral particle-pair, would be very tricky to detect. We would have more success with trying to manufacture monopolium than detecting it in its naturally-occuring state - although some very high energy cosmic rays might be emitted by decaying monopolium dyads.
One thing that strikes me is that every star should have a small but slowly increasing amount of maghydrogen at its heart. The particles would not be significantly slowed by friction with normal matter, so they wouldn't accrete in the same way that ordinary hydrogen atoms would- but gradually, over time, magatoms would interact with each other at the heart of a star and form a small nucleus. When this nucleus reaches the critical density it will become a black-hole- eventually absorbing the whole star (probably far in the future, long after the star becomes a black dwarf).