• Question: What is your view on the theory of Dark Matter?

    Asked by legend to Paul, Lily, Mark, Sarah on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by abster.
    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      We know that the universe is expanding by looking at the light coming from distance galaxies. (The light coming from objects moving away from us is `red-shifted’ meaning that the light waves are stretched)
      All of the stars and galaxies are moving away from each other. So the Universe is growing.

      That’s fine, until we calculate how fast it is happening… then we get some strange results.

      The expansion of the universe is driven by the energy and matter inside it. But when we calculate how much energy and mass is in the universe and compare it to the speed at which the universe is growing, it doesn’t fit!

      The universe is expanding much, much too quickly to be driven my normal energy and matter alone. So we assumed that there must be lots of `dark matter’ and `dark energy’ that we cannot see or detect.

      There has not been any experimental proof of dark matter. It is very hard, becaue we don’t know what we are looking for!

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      There are several ideas for what this mysterious Dark Matter might be, but nothing is proven yet. We do know that about 96% of the mass of the Universe is invisible to us, and we call that “missing mass” Dark Matter and Dark energy.

      Having listened to lots of talks by very smart people, I think Dark Matter exists, it’s just something that we haven’t been able to detect yet – as an example, you can’t see the air, but we know it is there as we breathe it, and when it moves fast (i.e. wind) we can feel it. But we can’t see it. So think of Dark Matter as a bit like air – we know it is there, but we just haven’t figured out how to see it yet (you can “see” air by putting smoke into it – so we need some Dark Matter smoke…!)

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      OK so I’m not an astronomer so it’s not really my area of Science – I guess Paul will have a better answer!

      From what I know it’s matter that is thought to exist but we can’t observe it – we think it exists as that explains the differences between what we measure and what we predict from what we know about how the universe works

      That said at the moment I don’t think we have any direct evidence of it and people are doing experiments to find it – so I’m awaiting the results of these before I make up my mind!

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      As far as I know, its this mystical material that is supposed to make up 90% of the universe but which people only infer is there because of its effects. Hopefully the Large Hadron Collider will shed some ‘light on the matter’ (hee hee). Did you see what I did there!???

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