Dark Matter: What Is It?

All that we see and experience in a normal day is made of matter. The thing that makes up the universe and all the rest — everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter — adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. More is unknown than is known. However, this is only a small amount of the actual universe, the rest of it is made up of two invisible substances called dark matter and dark energy. We will be trying to explain dark matter, but keep in mind that this is the short version.

Dark matter is not antimatter. Antimatter will annihilate regular matter when they come in contact. Dark matter is not dark energy. Dark energy is a supposed energy that is constantly created as the universe expands. So what is dark matter?

Well, you can’t see it and this ‘thing’ does not interact with regular matter in any meaningful way other than the gravity. However, it accounts for about 23% of the universe, so how do we know it’s there? Well the amount of mass that we can see and galaxies and stars clusters are not enough to produce the amount of gravity needed to pull things around.

Stars and galaxies would be expected to orbit slower the further they are from the center, but in fact, they’re orbit at around the same speed, so there must be extra mass distributed throughout the galaxy that we can’t see. And gravitational lensing, the effect of gravity distorting lights. We can see areas where light is being affected by gravity with no visible source of the distortion. In all cases, there must be something else there, something we can’t see, something dark.

Dark matter explains all of these by counting for missing amounts of mass that we can’t see but must exist. But what exactly is the dark matter made of? That’s a good question. With… an unsatisfactory answer… we don’t know, but we have some ideas.

We have massive compact halo object, or MACHOs… and weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs. These two particles try to explain what dark matter is made up.

MACHOs are large objects that exist at the edge of galaxies and possibly a part of neutron and dwarf stars or even black holes. WIMPs are very massive but neutral particles with such low interaction with ordinary matter that’s very difficult to detect.

WIMps particles seem to be the most likely candidate for the search of dark matter… and that what people looking for… detection experiments. By looking for the products of wimps annihilation with large telescopes and detectors. The problem is dark matter is still largely a mystery! Although its may seem solid and candid now, tomorrow, something else may be discovered eliminating the need for dark matter.

• Featured Image: ©AthosLuca.

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   January 10, 2017

   Reply

   Yehiel Gotkis

   I have observed a gravity-driven liquid vortex in a configuration limiting its major developments to proceed mostly in two dimensions in the upper thin liquid surface. The main question I was searching for an answer was – if the liquid vortex and the cosmic black hole vortex are similar, then what can I learn about the black holes from it? I have presented my summarizing notes on this matter at my page at Linked In and would like to show a couple of most intriguing points here.
   Scrutinizing the vortex pulling-in phenomenon produced a shocking grasp.
   • The liquid vortex developed structures very similar to the galaxy geometries when a handful of the dry shredded leaves was spread over the water surface.
   • The liquid vortex evidently was sucking both the foam and floating leaves and certainly the upper liquid surface layer. If this or similar phenomenon takes place for the spinning black holes, then the black holes should be considered to pull-in not only the material objects but also the spacetime itself whirling around the black hole in the same way as water whirls while flowing into the liquid vortex.
   • Being pulled into the black hole the nearby sections of the spacetime should be stretched more than at remote locations. Which could be observed by monitoring the wavelength of the cosmic microwave background in proximity to the supermassive black holes (expected to increase).
   And the most intriguing point – this model allows to explain the well-known paradoxical observations, namely, the galaxy rotation curves anomaly and the Universe accelerated expansion, with no necessity to introduce the two famous but still challenging to prove, hypotheses:
   • the black matter – the whirling spacetime additive contribution to the rotation of the visible matter in the black hole proximity,
   and
   • the black energy – at the galaxies periphery, where the pulling-in force diminishes, the still keeping on centrifugal force of the spinning spacetime accelerates the matter away from the black hole.
   I believe I am not mistaken with these my speculations.