Dark matter is very different from visible matter. Visible matter interacts through all four fundamental forces (strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity) whereas dark matter interacts only through gravity. If this seems weird to you, don't worry because you're not alone.
Dark matter is not at all part of our everyday experience. It is only influential at large scales and is really hard to see its effects, even for astronomers. It was discovered in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky through observations of the Coma Cluster, a nearby group of galaxies. These galaxies were found to be orbiting much faster than they should be. As a matter of fact, what we saw only accounted for 1% of the total expected mass.
Even stranger, according to theories and observations, visible matter only accounts for around 5% of all matter in the universe! Most of visible matter (85% of it) exists in low density gas between galaxies and can never be observed.
What we see makes up a very small portion of what is actually out there. Matter is not the whole story and much of the universe's secrets are yet to be discovered. In the coming years, many more experiments will be conducted to see if we can learn anything more.
Dark matter is not at all part of our everyday experience. It is only influential at large scales and is really hard to see its effects, even for astronomers. It was discovered in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky through observations of the Coma Cluster, a nearby group of galaxies. These galaxies were found to be orbiting much faster than they should be. As a matter of fact, what we saw only accounted for 1% of the total expected mass.
Even stranger, according to theories and observations, visible matter only accounts for around 5% of all matter in the universe! Most of visible matter (85% of it) exists in low density gas between galaxies and can never be observed.
What we see makes up a very small portion of what is actually out there. Matter is not the whole story and much of the universe's secrets are yet to be discovered. In the coming years, many more experiments will be conducted to see if we can learn anything more.
I never knew that dark matter was far more prevalent than visible matter, I had thought that the two in a way went hand in hand with each other. I was wondering however how these astronomers discovered dark matter through galaxies that were orbiting faster than they should have been, why did they come the conclusion of dark matter existing and how did they rule out other possibilities as to why these galaxies rotated as fast as they did?
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