But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is
Dark matter is stuff in space that has gravity, but it is unlike anything scientists have ever seen before. Together, dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe. That only leaves a small 5% for all the matter and energy we know and understand.
Over 80% of all matter in the universe is made up of material scientists have never seen. It's called dark matter and we only assume it exists because without it, the behaviour of stars, planets and galaxies simply wouldn't make sense.
About 20% of the matter in galaxies is visible or baryonic: subatomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. The other 80%, referred to as “dark matter”, remains mysterious and unseen. In fact, it may not exist at all. “Dark matter” is just a hypothesis.
In fact, researchers have been able to infer the existence of dark matter only from the gravitational effect it seems to have on visible matter. Dark matter seems to outweigh visible matter roughly six to one, making up about 27% of the universe.
Dark matter could be the result of fermions pushed into a warped fifth dimension. This theory builds on an idea first stated in 1999, but is unique in its findings. Dark matter makes up 75 percent of matter but has never been observed ...
Scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly. It doesn't interact with baryonic matter and it's completely invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current instruments.
In fact, recent estimates put dark matter as five times more common than regular matter in our universe. But because dark matter does not interact electromagnetically, we can't touch it, see it, or manipulate it using conventional means.
Dark matter can refer to any substance which interacts predominantly via gravity with visible matter (e.g., stars and planets). Hence in principle it need not be composed of a new type of fundamental particle but could, at least in part, be made up of standard baryonic matter, such as protons or neutrons.
The Higgs boson is the God particle. It is an elementary particle in the Higgs field. It is found in the Higgs field. Dark matter is not the same as the Higgs boson.
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. 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.
Like the jelly beans in this jar, the Universe is mostly dark: about 96 percent consists of dark energy (about 69%) and dark matter (about 26%). Only about 5 % (the same proportion as the lighter colored jelly beans) of the Universe— including the stars, planets and us—is made of familiar atomic matter.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, accounting for about 75 percent of its normal matter, and was created in the Big Bang.
It may be filled with particles predicted by theory but that scientists have yet to observe. Because scientists can't see dark matter directly, they have found other ways to investigate it.
The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.
In theory, it is possible to use the dark energy of the universe as a power source. In practice, the amount of energy that could be liberated in a local setting is many orders of magnitude too small to be useful or even detectable.
Dark matter doesn't interact with light in any way -- it doesn't give off light, but it doesn't absorb light either. Scientists can detect dark matter only by its effect on galaxies. Like normal matter, dark matter is made of atoms.
But if you want to get rid of it, a new study finds, you'll need to replace it with something even more bizarre: a force of gravity that, at some distances, pulls massive objects together and, at other distances, pushes them apart. The analysis underscores how hard it is to explain away dark matter.
When matter and antimatter meet they destroy one another in powerful explosions—so when two regular WIMPs collide, they would annihilate one another. But it is also possible that dark matter comes in two varieties—matter and antimatter versions, just like regular matter.
Antimatter is closer to you than you think.
Small amounts of antimatter constantly rain down on the Earth in the form of cosmic rays, energetic particles from space. These antimatter particles reach our atmosphere at a rate ranging from less than one per square meter to more than 100 per square meter.
In the most widely accepted scenario, dark matter is cold, made up of slow-moving particles that, aside from gravitational effects, have no interaction with ordinary matter. Warm dark matter is thought to be a slightly lighter and faster version of cold dark matter.
In their search for the elusive particle, they observed something else entirely. Their dark matter detector witnessed the rarest event ever recorded: the radioactive decay of xenon-124.
Dark matter is the collective term given to subatomic particles which are capable of altering a human's biological structure to turn them into meta-humans and allow them to develop superpowers.
Without dark matter, the joint effects of stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation would impart such a strong “kick” to the surrounding matter that it wouldn't just get blown back into the interstellar medium, but would become entirely gravitationally unbound from the massive star cluster that just formed.