CWRU theorists suggest the Standard Model may account for the stuff
Terrible title... Not your fault, Mindwolf. Dark matter has always been necessarily massive to account for observed galactic spin rates, galaxy mergers, and galactic gravitational lensing.
It's funny. I distinctly remember reading in Scientific American back in the early '80s about how the universe was balanced out by all these brown dwarfs we couldn't observe directly but as soon as we put WFPIC-2 on the Hubble we'd see their gravitational lensing, you bet you bet. "Dark Matter" simply meant "stars too small to ignite" and it was expected that there was a shitload of it. Then they put in the new camera and didn't see any gravitational lensing and everyone was all sad panda. So the cosmologists whipped out WIMPS and attempted to tear down the standard model and an entire generation of college students walked around going "I thought it was jupiters out there? WTF?" only to learn that science had backpedaled on them. Now we're pushing for self-assembled globs of helium somewhere between a tennis ball and Ceres.
I never knew a life without WIMPS, but that was a beautiful summary on the state of things, thanks. Time to see if we can find any evidence of Earth's atmosphere spiking in Hydrogen or Helium abundance. With Earth's looming Helium shortage, it's interesting to imagine shepherding a Helium glob back from deep space. I would ionize it with UV and then collect it with an electric field.
Ahh, but a helium glob made up of strange quarks? What does that even look like? I have friends that do cosmology but it tends to give me headaches. One of the tenets of sci fi is interstellar hydrogen. Based on research I did for a script, our local environment may have been swept of all interstellar H2 by (something something I don't remember). Bummer for the Bussard ramjet fans among us. But hey - Volvo-sized blobs of helium? Fuck yeah that'll run a VASIMR.