Two teams of radio telescopes pointed their antennas at two gas clouds: one at the very center of the Milky Way, the other in its quiet outskirts. Both clouds contain methanol molecules — an alcohol that acts as a tiny pendulum in space: it absorbs and emits radio waves at strictly defined frequencies. These frequencies depend on how much heavier the proton is compared to the electron. If that ratio changes even slightly, the pendulum starts ticking differently.
In the central cloud, the ticking shifted. Frequencies that are most sensitive to particle mass moved, while those that barely feel it stayed put. In the outskirts cloud, no such shift was seen. The difference is tiny, about three parts in ten million, but it's there and doesn't look like a random measurement error.
What could make molecules at the galaxy's center tick differently? The authors suggest dark matter. There's more of it at the center, and it could slightly alter the Higgs field — the one that gives mass to particles. Then protons and electrons would weigh slightly differently in different parts of the universe, and molecular frequencies would change along with them.
If this is confirmed, the constants of nature would no longer be constant. They would depend on the environment, like temperature or pressure. And then clocks made of molecules in different corners of the galaxy would show different times.
as written by the authors arXiv:2603.05990
In this paper, we show that methanol (CH3OH) torsional-rotational transitions, which have increased sensitivity to small variations of mu - the electron-to-proton mass ratio, are shifted relative to less sensitive transitions in the spectrum of the SgrB2(N) molecular cloud located at the Galactic center. At the same time, an identical set of methanol lines in the spectrum of the Orion-KL molecular cloud, located far from the center, shows no shifts. Interpreting this behavior of molecular frequencies in terms of Delta mu/mu = (mu_obs - mu_lab)/mu_lab leads to the following weighted mean values:
Methanol is the same alcohol found in windshield washer fluid. In space, its molecules serve as natural 'quantum clocks': they emit radio waves that can be used to check particle masses.
In the series 'The Expanse', an alien protomolecule changes the laws of physics in a local region — here's a similar idea, but with the Higgs field and dark matter.