Researchers use large, sensitive detectors located deep underground to directly search for the dark matter particles that may continually pass through the Earth.
Researchers can also detect dark matter indirectly through specific signatures in cosmic rays and gamma rays..
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may provide more direct clues about dark matter.
Many theories say the dark matter particles would be light enough to be produced at the LHC.
If they were created at the LHC, they would escape through the detectors unnoticed..
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..
Astronomers studying the motion of gas in the outer regions of galaxies found evidence in an ever-increasing number of systems for the existence of massive halos (20–24).
By the 1980s, dark matter had become an accepted part of the cosmological paradigm..
Neither.
The universe has been expanding for the last 13.8 billion years due to the initial big bang, when everything began to fly apart from everything else.
Dark energy is a theorized form of energy to explain the observed acceleration of that expansion..
Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.
One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space.
Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing..
Some believe that it may be normal objects such as cold gasses, dark galaxies, or massive compact halo objects (called MACHOs, they would include black holes and brown dwarfs).
Other scientists believe that dark matter may be composed of strange particles which were created in the very early universe..
The leading explanation is that dark matter is some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particle, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) or axions.
The other main possibility is that dark matter is composed of primordial black holes..
Researchers reveal a theoretical breakthrough that may explain both the nature of invisible dark matter and the large-scale structure of the universe known as the cosmic web.
The result establishes a ..
New research has revealed the distribution of dark matter in never before seen detail, down to a scale of 30,000 light-years.
In standard cosmologic calculations, "matter" means any constituent of the universe whose energy density scales with the inverse cube of the scale factor, i.e., ρ ∝ a−3 .
This is in contrast to "radiation", which scales as the inverse fourth power of the scale factor ρ ∝ a−4 , and a cosmological constant, which does not change with respect to a .
Dark matter makes up most of the mass of galaxies and galaxy clusters, and is responsible for the way galaxies are organized on grand scales.
Dark energy, meanwhile, is the name we give the mysterious influence driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Using fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background ( CMB ), astronomers determined that dark matter is about 27% of the contents of the universe, in terms of its overall contribution to the total mass and energy content of the cosmos.
A timeline of the universe from the Big Bang at the left to modern times at the right.
Topics referred to by the same term
Dark matter weakly interacting massive particles candidates with masses less than 1 GeV
