![boson x dark x boson boson x dark x boson](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ztpnjW8UnHQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
And right now that seems to be the story of dark matter. This study doesn’t rule out scalar bosons completely, but it does put some strong limits on the idea. There are also no old and cold scalar boson clouds within 3,000 light-years of Earth. Based on their work, the authors conclude that there are no young scalar boson clouds in our galaxy. They looked for evidence of a gravitational hum in the 20 – 600 Hz range and found nothing. So the team looked at gravitational wave data from LIGO and Virgo. It’s the gravitational equivalent of a faint hum. As a result, scalar bosons could create long-lasting gravitational waves that have a similar frequency. Depending on their mass, scalar bosons might also decay by emitting gravitons. It’s an interesting idea, but how could you prove it? It turns out that since scalar bosons interact gravitationally, they also interact with gravitational waves. Credit: Jyrki Hokkanen, CSC – IT Center for Science Illustration of a quark core in a neutron star. So perhaps dark matter is made of large diffuse clouds of scalar bosons. Since light can’t significantly heat them up, over time these scalar bosons would cool and collapse into large clouds. These would not interact strongly with light, only with gravity. The Higgs can’t be dark matter given its known properties, but some theories propose other scalar bosons. The only known scalar boson is the Higgs boson. So if you supercool a bunch of bosons (such as helium-4) they can settle into a strange quantum object known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Bosons, on the other hand, are perfectly happy occupying the same state. Gravity tries to push electrons or neutrons together, but the Fermi pressure is so strong it can resist gravity (up to a point). This is why white dwarfs and neutron stars exist. Fermions can never occupy the same quantum state, so when you try to squeeze them together, they push back. While it seems like a trivial distinction, the two kinds of particles behave very differently when brought together in large groups. Quarks and leptons are fermions, while force carriers are bosons. We know that most dark matter must be sluggish, and therefore “cold.” So if dark matter is out there, it must be something else. They don’t interact strongly with light, but neutrinos are a form of “hot” dark matter since neutrinos move at nearly the speed of light. But there aren’t nearly enough of them to account for the effects of dark matter we observe. They would appear like dark nebula commonly seen near the galactic plane. Even if dark matter were clouds of molecules so cold they emitted almost no light, they would still be visible by the light they absorb. Regular matter (atoms, molecules, and the like) easily absorbs and emits light.
![boson x dark x boson boson x dark x boson](https://lutris.net/media/games/screenshots/Boson_X_03.jpg)
The conditions of dark matter mean that it can’t be regular matter. So what is it? One team has an idea, and they’ve published the results of their first search.
![boson x dark x boson boson x dark x boson](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WDLkzYBMlrs/maxresdefault.jpg)
As the search for dark matter particles continues to turn up nothing, it’s tempting to throw out the dark matter model altogether, but indirect evidence for the stuff continues to be strong. The nature of dark matter continues to perplex astronomers.