Dark Matter Takes Fall In Study Suggesting It Is Made Of Ordinary Quarks

Could dark matter after all be not as extraordinary as made out? Could it be made from ordinary electrons and quarks?

Dark matter, that makes up a large part of the matter in our universe, may not be made of weakly interactive low-mass, exotic particles as believed.

Instead they could be macroscopic objects (macros) as big as an asteroid or a neutron star made from ordinary quarks, say physicists from Case Western Reserve University in a theoretical analysis.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Instead they could be macroscopic objects (macros) as big as an asteroid or a neutron star made from ordinary matter.

Reporter spelling error there. The correct spelling is “machos” not “macros”. “machos” stands for “macroscopic halo object”. It was an early hypothesis for dark matter but was discarded after searches failed to find them. The first important failure came from looking for microlensing events between here and one of the Magellanic Clouds, only two were found when over a hundred would have been needed. The second failure of the hypothesis, on the assumption that machos were not seen because they were too small to cause microlensing events, was when no rapidly moving objects were seen passing through the outer solar system. The objects in the Oort Cloud, for instance, cannot be machos because they move with the solar system and are too few in number.

I think we still have to put up with the fact that nobody really has the foggiest clue as to what dark matter really is – all sensible hypotheses that I know of have been shot down by hard observational lack-of-observation.

This is the Wikipedia article on Machos

macho MAssive Compact Halo Object. or Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Object. the first one was the original the second seemed just to be used first by people who didn’t know the original.