“The assumption that dark matter and regular matter originated in the same event, the Big Bang, is natural, given its simplicity. That is why it remained unchallenged for so long," Ilie said. "However, nature does not need to be parsimonious, abide by Occam’s razor, or by any of our aesthetic preferences."

Researchers have proposed a new model that suggests dark matter originated during the infinitesimally short span before the Big Bang.

A team of researchers has proposed an innovative model suggesting that dark matter might have originated before the Big Bang.

Thanks to gravity, at least we're aware dark matter exists. We also know it's eerily abundant, accounting for about 85 percent of all matter in the Universe. Aside from that, though, we're pretty clueless.

As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, researchers have now proposed a model where it is produced before the Big Bang.

Dark matter has always been one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. The "Dark Big Bang" theory may have the answer.

Energy transition Dark matter may have been created after the Big Bang, something that could soon be tested by gravitational wave detectors. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Tomertu) New constraints on a theory that says dark matter was created just after the Big Bang  – rather than at the Big Bang – have been determined by Richard Casey and  Cosmin Ilie at Colgate University in the US.

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) in the US has proposed a new model, indicating that dark matter may have originated in the short time before the Big Bang. The theory builds on physicist Alan Guth's 1981 idea of cosmic inflation,