A team of researchers has proposed an innovative model suggesting that dark matter might have originated before the Big Bang.

As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, researchers have now proposed a model where it is produced before the Big Bang.

Researchers have proposed a new model that suggests dark matter originated during the infinitesimally short span before the Big Bang.

According to Freese and Winkler, however, a Dark Big Bang is consistent with the evidence for dark matter – as long as it happened promptly, within about a month of the first Big Bang.

After almost a century of speculation, proposals and searches for dark matter, physicists now know that it currently comprises about 27% of the universe's mass-energy, with an abundance over five times that of ordinary matter like you,

Energy transition Dark matter may have been created after the Big Bang, something that could soon be tested by gravitational wave detectors. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Tomertu) New constraints on a theory that says dark matter was created just after the Big Bang  – rather than at the Big Bang – have been determined by Richard Casey and  Cosmin Ilie at Colgate University in the US.

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) in the US has proposed a new model, indicating that dark matter may have originated in the short time before the Big Bang. The theory builds on physicist Alan Guth's 1981 idea of cosmic inflation,

The big cosmic joke of dark matter is that, although we can’t see it, it apparently makes up the vast majority of all the matter in the universe. We literally can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re also not sure when and where it came from.

For nearly a century, dark matter has stood as one of the most perplexing mysteries in modern physics. Despite its invisibility, its existence is undeniable, as it exerts gravitational effects that are essential for explaining the structure and behavior of galaxies.