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New Perspectives on Dark Matter: What came after the Big Bang?

Updated: Apr 22

By Anvi Anand,

Tech Columnist; The Lawrenceville School, NJ


In traditional cosmology, dark matter was known to have been created during the Big Bang; however, this peculiar and unseeable matter may have existed after the universe first expanded, a darker and colder shadow following the first “Bang."


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Dark matter is essentially a widely accepted theory of a substance that makes up 85% of the universe and exerts a gravitational force that cannot be directly observed, making all evidence pointing towards it extremely indirect from visible matter. Unlike the things humans consider as “matter” in our everyday lives, dark matter possibly consists of weakly interacting massive particles, known as WIMPS, that have up to 1,000 times more mass than a proton. Since there is not enough ordinary matter present in the universe to explain the groupings of galaxies, scientists have identified “dark matter” to be the missing piece to the puzzle. According to the US Department of Energy, “In the 1970s, Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution found evidence for dark matter in her research on galaxy rotation. Today, we have much more evidence for the presence of dark matter in galaxies, the interaction of dark matter halos during galactic cluster collisions, and the distribution of dark matter (and even its absence) across different types of galaxies” (Bautista, 2024).


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Visual Representation of Dark Matter


This new perspective that dark matter did not originate during the Big Bang roots down to the assumption that dark matter was created at the same time as regular matter. In the Dark Big Bang theory, there are two big bangs; the dark matter later being produced by the decay of a field that mixes with the “Dark Sector,” a set of dark matter particles and their interactions” (Lea, 2024). Detecting any gravitational waves produced by the Dark Big Bang would act as significant evidence to prove this new theory. However, the universe’s cosmic microwave background (CMB) reveals the influence of dark matter on the structure only after the universe cooled enough for gravity to dominate. Dark matter’s “freeze-out” of particles after the intense radiation period in the Big Bang is assumed to have happened later than protons and neutrons due to the WIMPs’ weak interactions, thus proving why scientists are unable to detect this hidden matter.


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If dark matter was, in fact, formed after the Big Bang, traditionally accepted physics of the origins of the world would shift into a different light. Our understanding of the galaxy’s formation would be a lot different—galaxies would be smaller in size due to less matter being pulled together to form planets and stars. The cosmic web, or the large-scale structure of the universe, would appear different with this later-formed matter portion as well. The process of the Big Bang is not as “parsimonious” as we simplify it to be. Dark matter remains a mystery, opening doors to new discoveries on the genesis of the vast universe and leaving scientists in further curiosity.


----Words Cited

NASA. (n.d.). Dark matter & dark energy. NASA Science. Retrieved from https://science.nasa.gov/universe/dark-matter-dark-


Lea, R. (2023, March 6). A second Big Bang could have created a second dark matter, study suggests. Space.com.


Bautista, L. (n.d.). DOE Explains… Dark Matter. U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved from


University of California, Davis. (n.d.). Hot and cold relics of the Big Bang. LibreTexts Physics. Retrieved from


Ouellette, J. (2023, March 8). Dark matter mystery deepens with new Big Bang theory. Gizmodo. Retrieved from

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