Did dark matter destroy the universe? You might be looking around at the way things "exist" and thinking "No", but we're talking about ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why?
Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have another idea. Dan Hooper and Alexander Belikov posit that invisible, self-destructing dark matter may have blown up every atom in the universe. At least it's plausible in that if we wanted to ionize an entire universe, we'd want something that sounded that awesome.
Dark matter is a candidate for providing ionizing radiation because, if it exists at all, it's its own antiparticle: if two dark matter particles hit each other they can blow up. Insane as it sounds, the theory predicts that despite making up most of everything the particles themselves are so tiny, and so terribly fussy about colliding, that they can form huge structures without destroying themselves. Positron emissions which may be an indication of exactly this kind of self-destruction have been observed by the European PAMELA satellite currently orbiting the Earth.
link: Was Universe 1.0 Destroyed by Dark Matter?
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