Everything from throwing the first pitch at a Yankees game to the movements of constellations can be explained using Newton’s theory. Newton’s Theory of Gravity explains most large-scale events fairly well. Scientists have been trying to figure out ways to observe dark matter and make predictions based on theories of it but without much success. Because dark matter does not interact with the electromagnetic force - which is responsible for visible light, radio waves, and x-rays - all of our evidence is indirect. When it comes to science, the trouble with something that you can’t observe is that it’s hard to say much about it. They would have broken up because there wouldn’t have been enough gravity to keep the trillions of stars in place. Otherwise, galaxies wouldn’t have been able to stick around as long as they seem to do. In fact, the vast majority of the universe (a whopping 85%) must be dark matter. They couldn’t really say what properties it might have except that it must have gravitational pull, and there must be quite a bit of it. Something must be keeping the stars from flying away, and they called that something dark matter. Scientists thought that there must be more matter present in these galaxies than we can currently observe. Stars at the outer edges of disk galaxies were moving so fast that the force of gravity generated by the observable matter there wouldn’t have been able to keep them from flying out into deep space. Galaxies are held together by the force of gravity, which is strongest at the center where most of the mass is. The stars at the outer edges of some galaxies were moving far too fast.
What became abundantly clear as more and more data came in was that galaxies were not behaving as expected. Scientists often spend years gathering data and then proceed to analyze it to make the most sense of what they are seeing. Equipment such as the famous Hubble telescope measures visible light while other technology, such as radio telescopes, measures non-visible phenomena. Scientists can observe far-away matter in a number of ways. However, a growing number of physicists suspect that the answer may be that there is no such thing as dark matter at all. Scientists since the 1960s and ’70s have been trying to figure out what this mysterious substance is, using ever-more complicated technology. Decades later, Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark noted that the universe must contain much more matter than we can observe.
More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin offered it as an explanation for the velocity of stars in our own galaxy. The short answer is that no one knows what dark matter is. What is dark matter? It has never been observed, yet scientists estimate that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. What is dark matter? Does it even exist, or do we just need an adjustment to our theory of gravity?
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