Hello of us, tune in each week of 2023 for the most effective in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, delivered to you by Celestron.
This week, we’ll focus on dark matter, an invisible and mysterious type of matter that has monumental implications for the final word destiny of our universe.
Darkish matter was posited by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort within the 1930 when he studied star motions within the Solar’s neighborhood. As a result of the galaxy was not flying aside, he reasoned, sufficient matter should reside within the disk to maintain the celebrities from shifting away from the galaxy’s middle. Oort postulated that within the Solar’s neighborhood, thrice as a lot dark matter existed as brilliant matter.
Stronger proof got here later as astronomers examined the luminous disks and halos of galaxies, finding out their rotation curves to get a glimpse into how some dark matter is distributed.
Different clues for the existence of dark matter come from finding out galaxy clusters. Additionally within the Nineteen Thirties, American astronomer Fritz Zwicky deduced that a lot bigger clouds of dark matter exist within the Coma cluster of galaxies, about 300 million light-years from Earth. By trying on the Doppler shifts of particular person galaxies within the cluster, Zwicky concluded that 10 occasions extra mass than was detected by way of seen gentle have to be current to maintain the galaxies gravitationally certain.
One of many nice mysteries of latest many years facilities on a really fundamental query about dark matter: What precisely makes up these things? Over time, scientists have proposed many alternative prospects, and every has its personal strengths and weaknesses when it comes to explaining astronomers’ observations. They embody large numbers of regular neutrinos; MACHOs (large compact halo objects) corresponding to brown dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes; and WIMPs (weakly interacting large particles) corresponding to unique particles, axions, large neutrinos, and photinos.
No matter it consists of, dark matter carries monumental implications for the construction and way forward for the cosmos, because it accounts for 26 % of the universe’s total mass-energy.
For extra info on the potential explanations for dark matter, see right here: https://astronomy.com/news/2018/09/what-is-dark-matter
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