Although that doesn’t seem like a lot, they also believe that 68% is dark energy, an unknown form of energy (modeled on the name dark matter) that’s causing the universe to expand faster than we expect. Some scientists estimate that dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe around us. Others suggest that it’s just a type of weakly-interacting particle that we can’t detect yet, while still others have proposed a new theory of gravity to account for the issues dark matter suggests. Some theories suggest a link between dark matter and smaller black holes, dense bodies like brown dwarf stars, extra dimensions, or parallel worlds.

Nor is it made of dark clouds of normal matter, called baryonic matter, because that would absorb radiation and could be detected. They do know, however, that dark matter is not galaxy-sized black holes, because we’d be able to detect the light from gravitational lensing (bending of light from a more distant source), and that it’s not antimatter, as antimatter makes tiny explosions upon contact with matter. Scientists don’t exactly know what it consists of, even if it really exists in the form that the term implies, and how to even define it in the first place, making it one of the top, unsolved problems in physics. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the existence of dark matter, sometimes characterized as cold and slow-moving, was gradually accepted by many scientists as other pieces of evidence began to build up.īut the story of dark matter is far from over.

Astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, working on this problem, suggested this might be accounted for by dark matter. For instance, stars in the outer regions of spiral galaxies moved faster than they should, which suggested these galaxies had far more mass than scientists had accounted for. The term dark matter was in use by scientists as an English term by 1922.Īs astronomy and astrophysics progressed throughout the 20th century, inconsistencies about the way the universe was assumed to work began to add up. In 1904, in an effort to address the problem, Lord Kelvin found that the estimated mass of the Milky Way Galaxy was less than its observable mass, and attributed the difference to stars that were so-called “dark bodies.” Answering Kelvin in 1906, French physicist Henri Poincaré argued there wasn’t any special “matière obscure,” translated as (and the first known use of) dark matter, but rather undetected, non-light- emitting stars.

In the late 19th century, astronomers noticed dark regions in otherwise dense clusters of stars. As NASA explains on its website, the dark in dark matter comes from the fact that “it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see.”

Dark matter blake