Dark Matter May Be Less Mysterious Than We Thought
Unlike ordinary particles, dark matter seems to feel only gravity, not the other forces of nature. But new observations show that might not be true after all
Astronomers have been struggling for nearly 80 years to figure out what makes up the mysterious dark matter that pervades the universe. They came up with the idea of it to explain why, judging from the motions of galaxies, the universe seems to have so much more mass than the visible stars and galaxies can account for. They strongly suspect it’s some sort of exotic subatomic particle, created in the Big Bang in mind-blowing quantities and not visible by any means except by the pull exerted by its gravity. The particle notion is still mostly theoretical, given that astronomers have not yet detected one of these particles directly. (See A First Glimpse of the Hidden Cosmos).
But a new set
