The findings were published on April 9 in Physical Review Letters and are attributed to researchers led by Hai-Bo Yu from the University of California, Riverside.

The key insight is that the same SIDM mechanism could operate in vastly different environments (distant universe, our galaxy, and a neighboring satellite galaxy), producing densities difficult to reconcile with the standard model.

The three phenomena are difficult to reconcile with the standard cosmological model, but SIDM naturally yields the high densities needed to explain them in each environment.

The study by Hai-Bo Yu of the University of California, Riverside, published in Physical Review Letters, forms the basis for these claims.

The explanatory mechanism is framed as a unifying solution across vastly different scales and settings, from distant galaxies to structures within our own galaxy and its satellites.

According to Hai-Bo Yu, the same mechanism could produce dense clumps capable of influencing light from distant galaxies, create a visible scar in a stellar stream, and act as an invisible gravitational trap capturing stars in a cluster.

The researchers caution that whether SIDM is the correct description will require further observations and evidence, but the unifying potential of a single mechanism makes SIDM a promising candidate for explaining multiple cosmic puzzles.

The author notes that future observations are needed to confirm whether SIDM accurately describes dark matter, but the potential to explain three cosmological mysteries with one theory makes SIDM a promising candidate.

A physicist from the University of California, Riverside proposes self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) as a single mechanism that could explain three independent cosmic puzzles—the strong gravitational lensing object JVAS B1938+666, a gap in the GD-1 stellar stream, and the unusual star cluster Fornax 6 in the Milky Way’s Fornax satellite galaxy.

Self-interacting dark matter allows dark matter particles to collide and exchange energy, leading to dense cores through gravothermal-like processes that non-interacting (cold) dark matter cannot produce.

In the LCDM framework, dark matter is cold and collisionless, but the proposed self-interactions reshape dark matter halos and can create dense cores capable of explaining the observed anomalies.