Ask Ethan: It's Absurd To Think Dark Matter Might Be Made Of Hexaquarks, Right?
“Lots of science headlines [are] telling me dark matter might be a Bose-Einstein condensate of d* hexaquarks. Only problem I see? When notionally detected d* hexaquarks lived for 10-23 seconds. What's your take?”
There are lots of ideas out there in physics: some good and some bad; some popular and unpopular. One of the recent ideas that’s caught on, at least among the general public, is that dark matter might be made out of hexaquark particles: the d*(2380) excited state resonance of the deuteron. The idea is pretty wild, but the excited state particle is real and observed, and many of the objections that you’d think of right away (that too much binding energy is required; that this would destroy the successes of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis) can be evaded. But even so, there are good physics reasons to think not only isn’t this possible, but it’s a bad idea from the get go.
Come take a deep dive into the physics of hexaquarks, and learn why the d* particle is heavily unlikely to be dark matter.