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Dark Matter Essay

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There is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to astrophysics and cosmology than that of "dark matter". The controversy, as the name implies, is centered on the notion that there may exist an enormous amount of matter in the Universe that cannot be detected from the light that it emits. The evidence of dark matter is from the motions of astronomical objects, specifically stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations.

The basic argument is that if we measure velocities in some region, then there has to be enough mass there for gravity to stop all the objects from flying apart. When such velocity measurements are done on large scales, it turns out that the amount of inferred mass is much more than …show more content…

The particles include photinos, neutrinos, gravitinos, axions, and magnetic monopoles, among many others. Of these, researchers have detected only neutrinos -- and whether neutrinos have any mass remains unknown. Experiments are under way to detect other exotic particles. If they exist, and if one has a mass in the correct range, then that particle might pervade the universe and constitute dark matter.

The MACHO Project is a collaboration between scientists at the Mt. Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories, the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Santa Barbara, San Diego, & Berkeley campuses of the University of California, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Their primary aim is to test the hypothesis that a significant fraction of the dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way is made up of objects like brown dwarfs or planets: these objects have come to be known as MACHOs, for MAssive Compact Halo Objects. The signature of these objects is the occasional amplification of the light from extragalactic stars by the gravitational lens effect. The amplification can be large, but events are extremely rare: it is necessary to monitor photometrically several million stars for a period of years in order to obtain a useful detection rate. For this purpose they must have built a two-channel system that employs eight CCDs, mounted on the 50 inch telescope at Mt. Stromlo. The high data rate (several GBytes per night) is

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