preview

Dark Matter And Dark Energy

Decent Essays

Dark matter and dark energy are some of the most mysterious forces in our universe. They encompass around 95 percent of our universe, however, the human race is blinds to the truth of their existence. What we truly know about the mystery that is a majority of our universe is near insignificant compared to the possibilities that exist. We know that they exist and that they do something. Their discovery wasn’t even a sign of humanities dawning intellect, it was a mere accident.
The scientific community had no inkling that the universe was made up of more than what we can see until the 1930’s. A Swiss astronomer—Fritz Zwicky—was measuring the speed of the orbits of galaxies in the Coma Cluster (Ferris). His calculations indicated that the …show more content…

As the search for the true identity of dark matter goes nowhere, scientists call the dark matter WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles (Ferris). The scientist don’t know exactly what they are looking for, so they named it after one of the confounding properties possessed by this hidden substance. Scientists have a slightly greater idea of the properties of dark matter than they do its identity. The name WIMPS—weakly interacting particles—comes from then fact that dark matter barely interacts with “normal” matter or itself (Ferris). Evidence of this is found in the Bullet cluster, where two clusters are colliding (Ferris). Astronomers found clumps of has gas at the center—ascribed to the collision of normal matter (Ferris). However, they also found a large concentration of mass for each cluster far from the center of the collision (Ferris). They believe that the more massive parts of the clusters that are made up of dark matter are continuing on (Ferris). The dark matter is seemingly unaffected by the massive collision of multiple galaxies, indicating that it is neither pulled along by the normal matter surrounding it nor attracted to its dark counterpart. Other investigations indicate that the formation of galaxies is due to the gravity of dark matter pulling materials together early in the formation of the universe (Ferris). If this is true, than the presence of dark matter is responsible for every cohesive body of mass in the universe. Our lives

Get Access