Dark matter might be made of tiny "nuggets" the size of a hair that weigh as much as an entire car.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.16686
The Takeaway
Instead of ghostly, invisible particles, researchers propose that dark matter consists of ultra-dense blobs left over from the Big Bang. These 'strangeon nuggets' would be so heavy that they could account for the universe's missing mass while being small enough to have gone undetected until now.
From the abstract
Strong nuggets with a baryon number of $A\sim 10^{10-30}$ could be able to survive from the cosmic separation of the QCD phases, provided the transition from strange quark matter to strangeon matter is accounted for, thereby evading evaporation in the early Universe. Such strangeon nuggets may serve as a dark matter candidate within particle standard model. We formulate the corresponding phase transition of cosmic strange matter, establishing a parameter space which reasonably accommodates obser