Matter with dark matter: it can influence the shape and motion of galaxies.
Matter with dark matter: it can influence the shape and motion of galaxies.
Dark matter is more than a name: it is part of our universe. But it is totally unknown to our everyday experience. Based on the evidence, scientists think it is invisible in the true sense of the word: It simply does not interact with light. Gravity, however, is universal, and dark matter can still influence the shape and motion of galaxies. But we’ll never see it. At least not directly.
As much as we would prefer to live in a simpler universe, dark matter is not the product of some astronomer’s dream after a nighttime session. It is only after decades of careful observation that cosmologists have come to the inescapable conclusion that most of the matter in our universe is simply invisible.
Early indications of dark matter arose in the 1930s, when astronomer Fritz Zwicky made the first X-ray observations of the Coma Cluster, a dense knot of a thousand galaxies more than 300 million light-years away. Galaxies are not very bright in X-ray light, but galaxies in a cluster swim in a hot, thin soup of a gas plasma with some unique properties, which emits high-energy radiation. In his initial measurements, Zwicky noted an inconsistency: The plasma was too hot. Stable systems such as galaxy clusters are an equilibrium study. In this case, the tendency of a hot gas to expand is balanced by the attraction inward of its own gravity.
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