The new model was devised by PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence postdoctoral researcher Gilly Elor, alongside University of Michigan scientists Robert McGehee and Aaron Pierce.

One of the current leading suspects in the hunt for dark matter candidates, are so-called " Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" or "WIMPs."

This 3D map illustrates the large-scale distribution of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing by using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The aforementioned phase transition in the HYPER model sees the mass of the mediator particle suddenly decrease with this change occurring after the formation of dark matter.

"When I first thought about how a phase transition could circumvent stringent cosmological constraints and provide a serious dark matter benchmark, I was extremely excited and naively expected to write a paper within a few-month time period.

"Years later, my collaborators and I had found that even the assumption of this phase transition was not enough to guarantee protection from the many serious bounds that any new model of dark matter must face and overcome."