How Do We Know Dark Matter Exists?

dismal matter ca n’t be seen or detected by any of our cat’s-paw , so how do we know it really exists ?

Imagine the Universe was a pie , and you were going to slice it up into tasty dowry fit to what proportions are what . The large portion of the pie , 68 % would go to dark free energy , that mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the Universe . 27 % would go to dark issue , the orphic matter that skirt galaxies and only interact through gravity . A bare 5 % of this Proto-Indo European would go to even normal matter , the hooey that stars , planets , gas , junk , and humans are made out of .

grim topic has been given this name because it does n’t seem to interact with regular topic in any way . It does n’t clash with it , or engross energy from it . We ca n’t see it or observe it with any of our instruments . We only eff it ’s there because we can see the force of its gravity .

Now , you might be saying , if we do n’t know what this matter is , and we ca n’t find it . How do we know it ’s actually there ? Is n’t it probably not there , like dragons ? How do we know moody matter really exist , when we have no idea what it actually is ?

Oh , it ’s there . In fact , pretty much all we know is that it does live . Dark matter was first theorized back in the thirties by Fritz Zwicky to account for the movement of beetleweed clusters , but the mod calculations were made by Vera Rubin in the sixties and 70s . She calculated that beetleweed were spinning more cursorily than they should . So quickly that they should shoot themselves aside like a merry - go - round ejecting shaver .

Rubin imagined that every extragalactic nebula was stuck inside a vast halo of dark matter that supplied the gravity to hold the coltsfoot together . But there was no way to in reality notice this stuff , so astronomer project other models . Maybe gravity does n’t work the way we suppose it does at vast distances .

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But in the last few years , astronomers have commence good and better at detecting dreary topic , strictly though the effect of its gravitation on the path that light takes as it crosses the Universe . As light travels through a neighborhood of black matter , its path gets distort by gravity . alternatively of taking a unbent line , the light is bent back and away depend on how much dark matter is fleet through .

And here ’s the amazing part . Astronomers can then map out out regions of dark topic in the sky just by expect at the distortions in the visible light , and then working rearward to figure out how much intervening dark affair would take to be there to cause it .

These technique have become so advanced that astronomers have come upon unusual situation where galaxies and their dark matter have gotten strip away from each other . Or saturnine matter galaxies which do n’t have enough flatulency to make stars . They ’re just gargantuan blob of dark issue . Astronomers even expend dark subject as gravitational lens to study more aloof objects . They have no thought what black matter is , but they can still use it as a scope .

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They ’ve never conquer a dark matter particle , and have n’t study them in the lab . One of the Large Hadron Collider ’s next labor will be to try and generate particles that match the feature of dark matter as we read it . Even if the LHC does n’t actually make dark subject , it will help oneself narrow down the current theories , hopefully help physicists centre in on the true nature of this mystery .

This is how skill put to work . Someone discover something unusual , and then the great unwashed propose theory to explain it . The theory that best matches reality is consider correct . We live in a modern world , where so many scientific theories have already been proven for hundreds of years : germs , gravitational attraction , evolution , etc . But with dark matter , you ’re alive at a time when this is a mystery . And if we ’re prosperous , we ’ll see it solve within our life-time . Or maybe there ’s no dark matter after all , and we ’re about to get word something totally newfangled about our Universe . Science , it ’s all up to you .

This post byFraser Cainoriginally appear atUniverse Today . It has been republished with permission .

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