In this episode we learn about the missing matter in the universe and look at evidence that supports the theory that dark matter is hydrogen - but trapped in a special state.
Top Takeaways:
Astronomers are searching for large clouds of “dark matter” that surround galaxies and may constitute up to 80% of all matter in the universe.
Dwarf galaxies have been found to contain a smaller ratio of luminous to dark matter, suggesting dark matter could be cold hydrogen gas.
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light has been detected from space but has only implausible assignments to known species.
Hydrino atoms and molecules are predicted to emit EUV light as they form, but do not emit light under normal conditions.
Diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) are hundreds of absorption lines from space that have not been unambiguously assigned to any known species.
Absorption lines of hydrino molecules have been demonstrated in the laboratory and match several DIBs lines.
You can listen to this podcast or read the article, below.
A long standing mystery
For decades, astrophysicists have been hunting for something they can tell is there, but can’t see. The first discovery was in 1933, when CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that the galaxies within the Coma cluster were orbiting one another too quickly. Much too quickly.
In the solar system, the orbit of an object is related to its mass and its velocity. If it is moving too fast, the object leaves the solar system. If it is moving too slowly, it falls into the Sun. The same rules apply for stars in a galaxy, and galaxies within a galactic cluster, like the Coma cluster.
Based on the visible luminosity of the galaxies in the Coma cluster, they should have been orbiting one another at about 80 kilometers per second. Instead, they were moving over thousands of kilometers per second. Zwicky was led to speculate:
“dark matter is present in much greater amount than luminous matter.”
There was more stuff out there, and it was “dark.” If the six-year-old Calvin from the Calving and Hobbes strip had naming rights, it might have been the “invisible omnipresent lurking mass of doom.” But for now, we are stuck with the term “dark matter.”
Other astronomers began to find similar results with other clusters of galaxies. Sinclair Smith was the first to theorize that the missing mass was likely a large cloud of gas that formed a “halo” around galaxies. Today, when you run computer simulations of galaxies, surrounding them with a large cloud of dark matter does a good job of focusing the luminous part into a nice spiral.
While small inconsistencies between theory and experiment is acceptable and even encouraging, huge inconsistencies make us groan. Most astronomers chose to ignored the problem. Fifty years went by before there was serious discussion in the scientific community, while evidence continued to accumulate.
Another astronomer, J. H. Ort, looking at the Spindle galaxy (NGC 3115) found that dark matter is present above and below the equatorial plane of the galactic disk, rising in proportion to 10 times that of luminous matter. At the outer rim of the visible disk, dark matter rises to 250 that of luminous matter.
In 1964, Vera Rubin and W. Ford began studying the Andromeda galaxy, our close neighbor in space at only 2.5 million light years. Ford had invented a new spectrograph that allowed them to measure velocity with a resolution 10 times better than before. By 1968, they were able to plot the angular velocity of the stars, from the core to the galactic edge, on a graph. They expected to find a diminishing curve like what we see for the velocity of planets in the solar system - the farther away, the more slowly they orbit. Instead, the line was mostly flat.
The stars in the metropolis of Andromeda’s central bulge, those in the suburbs, and those in the rural outskirts were all moving at the same velocity. Even those stars at the rim of the visible disk didn’t show any sign of slowing down. Over the next decade, this analysis was performed for other galaxies, and every one had a flat rotation curve.
If our theory of gravity is correct over scales vastly larger than our own solar system, most galaxies are surrounded, submerged, and stabilized by enormous halos of dark matter. It represents not just some of what is out there, but the overwhelming majority of matter in the universe — perhaps 10 times what can be seen.
Astronomers received this possibility with incredible hostility. Some thought that Rubin and Ford were ruining their careers by pursuing the problem. Dark matter became the source of arguments at conferences. But eventually astronomers had no choice but to accept the overwhelming evidence that there was a serious problem.
With a sigh, they began to theorize.
MACHO’s, WIMP’s, or MONDs?
What are our options for dark matter?
It could be made up of objects that give off little or no light. In this group we have black holes or other stellar remnants, such as white dwarfs or neutron stars, or nonluminous stars like brown dwarfs or Jupiter-like rogue planets. These are called Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Object (MACHO’s).
Although we have discovered supermassive black holes at the core of most galaxies, with the mass of millions of suns, this mass is in the wrong place. It can’t be in the core, it needs to be in the halo.
Instead of a large heavy stellar object, dark matter could be a small particle. Maybe it is hot, moving at relativistic velocities through the galaxy, or maybe it is cold, moving slowly but only weakly interacting with normal matter. For the love of acronyms, astronomers call these Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP’s).
One such particle could be the “neutrino.” Although these were once thought to be massless, like light, they might indeed have mass. There are trillions flowing through you every second, so even a low mass would have a huge contribution to the weight of a galaxy.
Or, perhaps the missing mass is made up of theoretical but never-before-seen particles such as “axions,” “neutralinos,” or a particle predicted by string theory called the “sneutrino.”
Or perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with our theories of gravity or inertia. After all, evidence for dark matter is indirect. Some suggest we need to modify Newton’s theory over long distances to explain the discrepancy. These proposals for modified theories of gravity are called “Modified Newtonian Dynamics” (MOND).
A good counterargument to MOND proposals is that we see the bending of light due to the presence of dark matter that verifies the existence of mass that we cannot see.
We also see dark matter moving, separating from luminous matter, as galaxies collide. Since this takes millions of years, we are seeing a freeze-frame from the event.
This reminds us that we experience time on a characteristic human scale. A starfish on the beach appears to barely move. But time-lapse film shows that starfish are active, even social creatures. To truly observe a starfish, we need to alter our experience of time. Imagine the time scale of a redwood tree, in which the seasons pass like breaths. Or that of a continent, or a mountain. Galaxies live in something even longer than geologic time: cosmological time, and if we alter our perception to match, we find an equally ‘social’ existence, if I may use a metaphor.
Galaxies often collide over millions of years, their stars interpenetrating and intermingling in a kind of cosmic mating ritual. The gravitational maelstrom of these encounters can often spin off a small eddy of stars that becomes a new galaxy; a cosmic birth.
These young dwarf galaxies carry off stars, dust, and gas that originated in small regions of one or both of the parent galaxies. It is as if we had drawn the sample out with a syringe.
In 2007, Frederic Bournaud noticed that most theories predict that dark matter surrounds galaxies in large halos. So he went looking for a good syringe to obtain material in the galactic interior, where dark matter shouldn’t be.
He found NGC5291, a galactic collision surrounded by gas-rich collisional debris, including several dwarf galaxies. He found that these galaxies contained only about twice as much dark matter as luminous matter. And it must have been within the disk of the parent spiral galaxy.
Modeling the evolution of matter in the universe confirms that dark matter clumps in a way similar to normal matter. And it is likely born cold, with relatively low kinetic energy. It seems the “cold WIMP” hypothesis is beating the competition.
Perhaps, dark matter is almost normal stuff. It might be able to form stars like normal matter, although to my knowledge we have not seen direct evidence of a star forming out of dark matter. I will come back to this point later.
We live in a hydrogen universe. Of the matter that we can see, about 95% is made up of hydrogen. And what isn’t trapped in the infernos of stars linger in clouds of gas throughout the galaxy. Bournaud, in a moment of lucidity, states that the most natural candidate for dark matter (we might say the least imaginative possibility) is hydrogen gas.
Hydrogen is difficult to trace directly, so we estimate its existence via emission lines from carbon monoxide (CO). Bournaud suggested that either the missing hydrogen is very cold such that it doesn’t emit light, or CO lines are not a good indicator of the quantity of hydrogen in these regions. Bournaud needed about three times more hydrogen than could be traced with CO in the dwarf galaxy he was analyzing. To be undetectable, hydrogen gas must be extremely cold, only a few degrees above absolute zero. But the visible hydrogen observed in these dwarfs was warm, over 400 K. Other gases seen also appeared to be quite warm.
If hydrogen is the most natural assumption for the identity of dark matter, why the hell can’t we see it?
A New Kind of Hydrogen
In 1988, when John Farrell invited a former student, Randell Mills, to share his small office and laboratory at Franklin and Marshall College, he assumed it would be a short term accommodation.
Mills had graduated summa cum laude from F&M several years before with a BA in Chemistry, and had gone on to earn a Medical Degree from Harvard. A polymathic scientist, engineer, and mathematician, Mills had cruised through his Harvard coursework and spent a final year at MIT studying physics. Never intending to be a medical doctor, Mills was a fountainhead of ideas for new medical technologies he wanted to develop - one of which would earn him a publication in Nature (the world’s most prestigious scientific journal.)
At the time, Mills was developing an idea for an artificial gland that would regulate the body’s glucose and insulin. He need a lab space. As it turns out, Mills would spend four years in Farrell’s space, working day and night, often sleeping on the floor. Farrell would leave at night with Mills in the lab and find him still working when he came in the next morning.
One of the many projects on Mills’s mind was something that had piqued his attention while at MIT. In the program dubbed “Star Wars,” President Ronald Regan had solicited proposals for technologies that would the United States to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. Mills was interested in the potential of a laser, using electrons instead of light. He discussed it with his professor, Herman Haus.
Haus had, only the year before, written a paper on the physics of light. In general, light is produced by wiggling charged particles. Haus was the first to clearly articulate under what conditions light is emitted by matter, and importantly, under what conditions it is not. He handed the paper to Mills, as it was relevant to electron laser technology.
When Mills reflected on Haus’s work, he realized that it spoke to one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in physics: How could the electron remain in a circular orbit in the atom without giving off light? It was a problem that was as important as it had been forgotten, relegated to “historical” status, swept under the rug by the new quantum theory developed in 1925.
Mills, following in the footsteps of early 20th century theoreticians who thought about the electron as a classical particle, began to reimagine the architecture of the atom. Mills invented a “soap bubble” model, in which the electron was a spherical shell centered on the proton. It was his the first step toward a new theory of nature.
Mills would go on to rebuild quantum theory from the ground up. The theory was successful at calculating the energy states of electrons in atoms, as well as many other atomic problems that were out of reach of quantum theory.
Mills’s model also made a new prediction. Normally, the electron in the atom bounces around between orbits by absorbing and emitting light. Mills’s model calculated this phenomena accurately. But another kind of process, called resonant transfer, allows atoms to exchange energy. It is a phenomena that has been studied as a possible technology for charging cell phones. On an atomic level, Mills predicted a resonant transfer could allow the electron to drop to a new electronic state - one that had never been discovered before.
If possible, these states would bind the electron much more tightly to the nucleus, making the atom physically smaller and more inert. Mills called these “hydrinos.”
The chemical reaction to make hydrino atoms would also release energy, potentially hundreds of times more than combustion.
A new energy technology is the holy grail of physics, and in 1989, Mills dedicated himself full-time to hydrino research. For the next three decades, he led a team of scientists and engineers to show that hydrino exists, that it can be analyzed in the laboratory and found in nature, and that it could be brought to fruition as a new energy source. Although this story is still unraveling today, Mills and his team have published widely in scientific journals. And we have only started to understand the impact the discovery may have on astrophysics.
The Frontier of Extreme Ultraviolet Astronomy
On April 22, 1986, Stuart Bowyer, professor at UC Berkeley, watched a rocket launch from White Sands, New Mexico, ten minutes after midnight. It carried a spectrometer capable of seeing in the band of wavelengths known as the “extreme ultraviolet” (EUV) range, what Bowyer called the “last frontier in observational astronomy.”
For many years, astronomers believed that EUV astronomy would be futile. The Earth’s atmosphere absorbs EUV light, making ground-based telescopes impossible. Any light reaching a space-born telescope would also need to pass successfully through gas that permeates interstellar space in all directions.
Observing in the EUV was also difficult, for logistical reasons: new mirrors had to be developed that could focus the light without absorbing it, that could be exposed to space without glass windows (glass also absorbs EUV), and would be stable at extremely cold temperatures.
Unable yet to convince his peers that an EUV satellite was justified, Bowyer applied for smaller grants to launch sounding rockets into the upper atmosphere. With five minutes of observing time on each flight, he was able to test key equipment for later space missions while gathering useful data.
In a study in conjunction with graduate student Simon Labov, the spectrometer would not point at individual stars, but take light from broad regions of space to capture diffuse background radiation. Theoretically, this could tell us something about the interstellar medium, the space between stars.
The findings, published in 1991, identified several peaks that could only be assigned to highly unusual atoms of oxygen, silicon, neon, or iron. These are unusual because the peaks were not a great match, and they were highly ionized, meaning the atoms had many electrons stripped off them; and the atoms must have been at a very high temperatures - hundreds of thousands or millions of degrees.
The idea that the interstellar medium is filled with gas at these temperatures, generated more questions than answers.
In 1995, when Bowyer finally launched the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) telescope, it found EUV light, including stars hundreds of light years away, from white dwarves to stars with highly active corona. Astronomers counted thousands of EUV sources across the sky. Space was more transparent then anyone thought.
When the EUVE followed up with a study of the diffuse background however, it did not find the lines seen earlier. Instead it found a different set of broad peaks. The telescope was not specifically designed for diffuse observations, but it had the most sensitive equipment ever used.
When I followed up with Bowyer about the discrepancy, he felt that although all astrophysical data must be statistically significant to be published, most of it is overturned by later research. Perhaps the previous lines were merely artifacts. Or perhaps they were real, a possibility Bowyer considered equally plausible. Space is filled with stellar processes that result in distinct environments. One emission may be due to a cataclysmic variable star. Another a white dwarf. The source is out there. We just don’t know what it is.
Our solar system lives in an interstellar cloud of gas, within a much larger, lower density cloud called the Local Bubble. Astronomers have found that much of this gas within this bubble is ionized. To split an electron from a proton in the hydrogen atom, you needed it to absorb a photon with an energy at least in the ultraviolet, but perhaps higher frequencies such as EUV, X-ray, or beyond.
A team recently found that there is four times more ionized hydrogen than can be explained by the background ultraviolet light sources such as quasars and hot young stars. When you look right at a light source, the math works out, but when you look at darker areas of nearby space, there is a huge discrepancy.
Since UV and EUV emissions are quickly absorbed by interstellar gas such as hydrogen, the source for these emissions must be widely distributed across the sky.
The first explanation offered is that our bubble was produced by a supernova explosion some millions of years ago, which ionized most of the gas. But we see the same thing throughout the galaxy. If point-sources such as stars, nebulae, or supernovae are the source, they are not widespread enough.
Scientists have begun to speculate that the solution to this “ultraviolet catastrophe” could be some form of dark matter decay. The distribution of hydrogen-ionizing emissions seems to be distributed like dark matter in the universe.
So we are looking for a cold particle that is generally hard to detect, but decays with the release of light capable of ionizing space gas. It may also coincide with mysterious EUV emissions.
Hydrino Dark Matter?
In 2001, in my first year at college, I began to bring Mills up with chemistry professors, leading to some talk about him among the department staff. An emeritus professor gave me a stack of monthly issues of a journal with some of Mills’s papers, marking them up with his thoughts.
Early in my first year of Chemistry 101, a professor showed us an image of the excited state energies of hydrogen and joked as an aside (with a reference that I alone in the auditorium understood) “somebody thinks that there should be a bunch of lines down here, but there aren't any.”
The professor didn’t understand that according to Mills's theory, the electron in a hydrino atom doesn’t have excited states. Once the electron falls into a hydrino state, transitions that involve the absorption or emission of light are forbidden. The electron is locked in its orbit. This is unknown in nature. All substances absorb and emit light of some frequency.
Although hydrino is “dark” once formed, when the hydrogen atom shrinks to form a hydrino it releases high energy light, often in the EUV range. This kind of radiation from hydrogen has never been seen before.
The reaction cells at Mills’ laboratory are impressive, and the result of decades of engineering. The reactions occur in a hot, ionized gas called a plasma, consisting mostly of hydrogen gas. When electric current is applied, there is a brilliant, blinding light as the hydrino reaction occurs. Heat and light are a byproduct of the reaction which is much more energetic than the combustion of fossil fuels.
Once formed, hydrino gas molecules can be analyzed chemically. The gas shows rovibrational transitions corresponding to molecules with an interatomic distance that is smaller than conventional hydrogen gas. They can also be analyzed with nuclear excitations or spin-nuclear coupling. But after being formed, the gas does not reflect light through electronic absorption and emission.
As Vera Rubin was fond of saying “Nobody told us that all matter radiated. We just assumed that it did.”
Mills had found something that didn’t.
Possible hydrino states are an integer fraction of the size of ordinary hydrogen, at H(1/2), H(1/3), H(1/4), etc. The H(1/4) is the most common result of reactions harnessed by Mills. But this series goes all the way down to H(1/137).
When Mills’s team saw the data from EUV spectrometer, they compared the EUV lines with that of their own plasma experiments. They found that they could explain most of the EUV lines with hydrino transitions (H to H(1/2), H(1/2) to H(1/3), H(1/3) to H(1/4), and so on), and some of these lines could be seen directly in experiments. Other lines that had not directly observed could by explained by shifting them after being scattered by helium, which was present in the experiment.
There are many different ways hydrino can form. The resonant transfer reaction can be triggered by collisions between multiple hydrogen atoms, or with a helium ion. Hydrino can also be triggered to fall to deeper states by other hydrino atoms, causing the other to ionize. In the most recent engineered prototypes, Mills is using water molecules to trigger the reaction to make H(1/4) hydrinos.
Hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the universe. Whip up a universe, start with a lot of hydrogen, add a pinch of helium, and shake for a few billion years. You may end up with lot of hydrino on your hands.
The most mundane - and profound - answer to the mystery of dark matter could be large clouds of hydrino hydrogen gas in space. The hydrino reaction could explain why clouds of hydrogen gas are warm, yet we can’t see most of it. The ability of hydrino to form stars explains why it is depleted in the disk of the galaxy but prevalent outside it, in a halo. Hydrino molecules will dynamically behave as a “cold WIMP” and react to radiation pressure. The light produced by the hydrino reaction is also high frequency (EUV and X-ray), which allows it to ionize surrounding space gas. We know that EUV light does not travel far unless it is passing through a ‘window’ in space; but we observe ionized hydrogen across wide swaths of the sky; the hydrino reaction explains these sources.
In short: hydrino catalysis is happening everywhere, producing a diffuse glow throughout the universe.
Hydrino is telling us, in its own way, that it is out there.
Recently, a team of scientists decided to look for theoretical candidates for dark matter. They didn’t even need to rent a telescope. Instead, they went fishing in a pile of existing data.
X-ray data can be detected by large telescopes equipped with spectrometers; the team borrowed the spectroscopic data from several telescopes’ observations of 73 galaxy clusters.( Each cluster, remember, contains dozens of galaxies, each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars.) Then they “stacked’’ the spectra, using well-known atomic emission peaks to align the data at different redshifts. This had the effect of amplifying any real signals and diminishing random noise.
They were looking for a theoretical particle called the sterile neutrino. Expecting to find it in a narrow band between 2 and 10 keV, they discovered a small blip in the data at about 3.56 keV (another team found it at 3.52 keV). The blip was most interesting because there was no known corresponding atomic line. The authors of the study felt that they had perhaps found the signature of dark matter. After all, good chance that whatever was making the line was happening everywhere in the universe.
After reading this result, Mills calculated that a collision between an H atom and an H(1/4) hydrino — which is the most common hydrino product seen in experiments — would undergo a reaction to produce a H(1/17) hydrino with the emission of a band of continuum radiation with a cutoff at 3.48 keV.
That’s pretty close.
If Mills’s team can reproduce the transition in the lab, they may be able to convince the astrophysics community that dark matter is not an exotic new particle, but rather more of the mundane stuff from which the luminous universe is made.
Diffuse Interstellar Bands
Since publication of my original book in 2016, there has emerged a new, vital, piece of evidence that lends additional support to the hydrino dark matter hypothesis.
In 1919, an undergraduate student, Miss Mary Lea Heger, at the Lick Observatory, first observed faint, hazy dark absorption bands in the visible spectrum of the light from distant stars. Unlike atomic absorption lines, these lines were wide and soft, with diffuse edges. They did not shift with the motions of the stars, which indicated to astronomers that they were due to something in space between us and the stars: the interstellar medium (ISM).
Heger identified only two lines, but by 1938, a team of astronomers had catalogued six lines and clearly demonstrated that they were from the ISM, viewable along various lines of sight, and that various bands were well-correlated with one another. The lines did not always look exactly the same, sometimes they were clearly symmetrical, other times not. As the years went by, better telescopes and technology allowed astronomers to add additional bands to a list which now may constitute as many as 500 bands.
These bands, now known as the “diffuse interstellar bands” (DIBs) are the longest standing mystery in spectroscopy, as not a single DIB has been unambiguously assigned to any known atom or molecule since their discovery a century ago. More incredibly, whatever they are must exist ubiquitously throughout the galaxy.
Our best guesses are that the lines are due to either particles of dust, or molecules that have vibrational and rotational absorption frequencies in this range. Indeed, the closer we look at the bands, we more we see a shape to the peak (a “fine structure”) that resembles molecular rotations of free molecules.
Ask an astronomer today and they will suggest that the bands are most likely due to carbon molecules with multiple rings, or even carbon fullerenes. Only a couple of strong lines (out of 500) have been matched reasonably well to a fullerene. But it is difficult to study the absorption spectra of these molecules in the laboratory in conditions that resemble that of space.
The bands seem to be correlated with the presence of atomic hydrogen, but not molecular hydrogen gas.
Despite the fact that DIBs are a huge mystery in astrophysics, there is surprisingly little literature speculating on the connection between DIBs and dark matter. Dark matter is more commonly studied outside of the galaxy, whereas DIBs are a phenomena in our local neighborhood.
But perhaps one mystery informs another.
Because hydrino gas easily diffuses out of containers, the best way to analyze it is by trapping it in atomic scale cages, like that of a salt. Mills’s team found that they could trap hydrino gas (unlike hydrogen gas, which is much bulkier) in molecular cages of gallium oxide hydroxide (GaOOH). These cages allowed hydrino gas molecules to rotate freely, uninhibited by van der Waals interactions with neighboring molecules. The gas was analyzed via electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy by Professor Fred Hagen of the University of Delft, generating a unique signature - a fingerprint - for hydrino.
From these samples Mills also observed a series of absorption peaks that matched 10 lines known to be DIBs from a narrow region of the red visual spectrum. When Mills performed a theoretical calculation of hundreds of predicted absorption energies of hydrino molecules (including rotational energy, spin-orbital splitting and fluxon sub-splitting quantum numbers) he was able to match a whopping 380 DIBs that have been reliably reported in the literature.
This lends credence to the idea that hydrino - predicted in theory in 1989 and entirely unmotivated by the dark matter problem, is the most common state of matter in the natural world.
Why did it take so long to find? Neither hydrogen nor helium gas are heavy enough to be trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, although they are common constituents of the atmospheres of gas giants. Helium was actually first seen in the sun - hence its name, which derives from “Helios,” from the Greek god of the sun, before being analyzed on Earth.
Helium is also an inert noble gas. Hydrino hydrogen is even more inert, as well as unresponsive to light and diffusing quickly from containers. Although some serendipitous evidence for hydrino has been seen in the literature (it seems to be a byproduct of the industrial process that purifies argon gas) these signatures were marked unexplained and relegated to footnotes.
If hydrino is dark matter, more scrutiny of high energy emissions in space and diffuse absorption lines will add to this story. But one clear prediction is that we ought to observe normal stars forming in regions dominated by dark matter, showing that dark matter is everyday, star-forming stuff.
Thoughts and questions? Subscribe to join the conversation.
For further reading, this topic is covered in the chapter: Shedding Light on Dark Matter in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: how the hydrino is sparking a revolution in physics and clean energy by Brett Holverstott.
Share this post