Dark matter is still doing that classic thing—being everywhere and nowhere at once. It makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet it doesn’t show itself directly. Now, a recent cosmological model tries to connect the dots between two ideas that usually live in different parts of physics: cyclic universes and primordial black holes.
The model starts with a different “multiverse” than the one most people can picture. Misryoum newsroom reported that instead of parallel universes, physics leans toward a cosmic bounce: a universe that expands, contracts, and expands again in an endless cycle. Each “universe” isn’t parallel to the last; it’s sequential—almost like one chapter rolling into the next.
That raises a thorny question: can anything survive the end of a universe and carry on into the next one? Misryoum editorial desk noted that a paper published in Physical Review D argues yes. Author Enrique Gaztanaga, a research professor at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, shows that any structure larger than about 90 meters could pass through the final collapse of a universe and survive the rebound. These “relics” wouldn’t just persist—they could seed the formation of giant, unexplained structures seen in the early stages of the present-day universe. And, here’s where it gets more ambitious, they could also be tied to dark matter.
For years, the popular story has been that dark matter is an unknown particle (or particles), hidden in plain sight. But after years of experiments without direct detections, physicists have widened the search to alternatives. One proposal suggests dark matter might be an abundant population of small black holes that we simply overlook. It sounds neat, but the snag is big: to explain dark matter, those black holes would need to exist from the earliest moments of the universe—long before the first stars could collapse into anything black-hole-ish. There are indications that such objects could exist, but Misryoum analysis indicates a convincing physical mechanism for how they got there is still missing.
This is where Gaztanaga’s newly proposed model tries to do the heavy lifting. If cosmic bouncing really does let compact structures survive the collapse of a previous universe, then the current universe wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Instead, it would be born with pre-existing black holes—already there from the first instant. No extreme fluctuations, no finely tuned inflationary processes to set the stage. Just… legacy.
The pitch, essentially, is that the same framework could solve two riddles at once: the origin of black holes and the nature of dark matter. If it’s correct, dark matter wouldn’t be a mystery of the earliest universe at all. It would be a legacy left behind by a cosmos that came before ours. In Misryoum reporting, Gaztanaga also emphasized that much work remains to be done. Ideas like this must be tested against data—from gravitational-wave backgrounds to galaxy surveys and precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
Maybe that’s the part that feels both exciting and slightly nerve-wracking. When the possibilities are this wide, you can almost hear the questions stacking up—like the faint click of a keyboard in the background while someone tries to make the math behave. Gaztanaga’s wording lands similarly: “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded,” and the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang. The story doesn’t close neatly, though. It’s more like an opening—one that depends on what the universe lets us confirm next.
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