Lifeboat Foundation

Dr Konstantinos Dimopoulos, a physicist at the University of Lancaster, believes that at the centre of some galaxies – where densely packed gas and dust burns incredibly brightly around a supermassive black hole – powerful magnetic fields which fire out from the jets of the black holes could affect the properties of dark matter.

As the burning galactic nucleus churns, Dr Dimopoulos claim that one type of dark matter in particular, made of theoretical particles called axions, would be affected.