Every time a new discovery is made about the universe, it opens up a new box of unanswered questions. One of these boxes is marked dark energy/dark matter.
Whenever we look up at the universe at night everything we see, that is all the protons, neutrons and electrons, make up for only 4% of the mass and energy of the Universe.
The rest is the dark and mysterious stuff known as dark energy (70%) and dark matter (26%).
Scientists know that dark matter acts like regular matter when it comes to gravity but it doesn’t release light which makes it very different to what makes up the stars and planets that do their celestial dance about us.
One way they are trying to learn more about dark matter is by studying clusters of galaxies, in fact it was galaxies that gave us the first evidence that dark matter existed.
Because galaxy clusters move around so quickly there has to be a lot of matter to hold them together with their gravity. Most of the normal matter is hot gas but there is not nearly enough mass in this hot gas to hold all the normal matter together and that’s where invisible, dark matter comes into the equation.
To study some of the interesting properties of dark matter like whether it interacts with itself, the study of galaxy clusters violently colliding with other galaxy clusters has shown that dark matter can been wrenched free of normal matter which is something that doesn’t generally happen in the universe.
Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in all of physics
Studying clusters of galaxies is a good way of estimating how much matter there is in the universe and this helps to work out how much dark energy there is.
Another way to look at dark energy is to look at how galaxy clusters grow with time.
It seems that galaxies haven’t grown much over the last 6 or 7 billion years and it could be that dark energy is limiting the growth of these objects.
- So if it is so that we only know about 4% of the macrocosm, I wonder if the same applies for the microcosm?
- Is their dark matter, dark energy that goes into the making of our own internal universes?
- What holds all the molecules and atoms that go into making the structure of our bodies together?
- Is it another form of dark matter or dark energy?
- If there is how would we know, what would it do if we found out and does it really matter anyway?
All of these questions I am going to mumble over as I toss back a pint or two at my local and let the universe get on with its merry way, revealing its mysterious workings in its own good time which by our standards is too bloody long anyway to really make much difference to we, who are mere blinks in the existence of creation.
Cheers,
Clip Tycles
(the information for this article has been shamelessly collected and reassembled from an article titled “The Universe Darkly” by Megan Watzke from the Chandra website)
This comment is on dark matter and dark energy. For the first time, dark matter in the Sun has been clearly defined as the Uranium fission fragments left over on the Sun, in the following peer reviewed paper. Therefore, dark matter can be detected from distance through gamma rays, X-rays, EUV or UV. It is justified to be addressed as dark matter. First of all, it cannot be seen or detected through visible light. Secondly, dark matter emits dark radiation with energy higher than that of UV at eV level. As the dark energy lies in between that of X-ray and UV, it cannot be detected by the currently available light sensors like photomultiplier tube. My sub- atomic research lasted for 21 years with radioisotopes and XRF sources led to these conclusions on dark matter and dark energy. In the context of solar flare, the predicted Bharat radiation causing UV dominant optical radiation from within excited atoms of radioisotopes by valence excitation seemed to be the familiar dark radiation from cosmic sources. As Bharat energies produced internally within an excited atom cause non-thermal valence excitation resulting into UV emission from radioisotopes at room temperature, solar EUV may take place by valence excitation of dark energies from within excited atoms of radioisotopes present in solar flare regardless of temperature. Radioisotopes, predominantly emit gamma, characteristic X-ray or beta radiation, produced in Sun cause a new class of room temperature atomic spectra of solids (radioisotopes and X-ray sources) by a previously unknown phenomenon. As in the case of the current study, the gamma -, X-, or beta radiation emissions from radioisotopes formed by fission reaction in Sun cause two more generation of emissions: the predicted dark radiation, which is the same as Bharat radiation followed by EUV. Bharat radiation emission alone takes place without the accompanying UV dominant optical emission from highly ionized radionuclides left with a singly filled K shell such as tritium that can happen in a situation like nuclear fission. It is the dark matter that emits ionizing radiations (cosmic radiations) followed by dark radiation and UV dominant optical radiation. In conclusion it is the dark matter that gives us Sun light.
M.A. Padmanabha Rao,
UV dominant optical emission newly detected from radioisotopes and XRF sources,
Brazilian Journal of Physics, Vol.40, no.1, March 2010.
http://www.sbfisica.org.br/bjp/files/v40_38.pdf