![]() Shandera also emphasizes the overwhelming amount of further evidence to support the force's omnipresence.Įxploring the science of microscopic black holes In other words, astronomers suspect dark matter is making the universe stretch way faster than their calculations predict it should. ![]() "It's not enough to account for the motion of the objects - it looks like there's a lot more matter there." "You look at the motions of stars and galaxies, or clusters of galaxies, and you realize what we're able to infer about the mass that's there, that's giving off visible light or any kind of electromagnetic radiation," she said. Sarah Shandera, associate professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University and director of its Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, says the way astrophysical bodies move within the universe proves dark matter lurks out there. That's how scientists discovered the hidden material exists in the first place. That means less than 5% of the universe is visible, standard energy and matter we're used to on Earth.īut even though we can't see dark matter, it isn't sly enough to disguise its effects. Dark matter, which slows it down, holds 27%. Oh, and while we're on the topic, Earth might've been hit by them, too.ĭark energy, responsible for speeding up the universe's expansion, accounts for 68% of the cosmos. Taking it a step further, the wounds they inflicted should still be up there if these mini-abysses are proven to exist, dark matter may no longer be an everlasting enigma. Yes, you read that correctly: The moon might've been bombarded by atomic-sized black holes. Caplan contends that if dark matter can indeed be explained by these tiny black holes, then at some point, they would have punctured the moon. "There's this funny estimate that you can do," says Matt Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University and one of the theorists behind the research published in March. But how? We have enough trouble finding supermassive, visible ones with high-tech equipment tailored to the search. So to ensure this innovative hypothesis isn't a dead end, we'd need to locate unseen, miniature versions of black holes. Solving the puzzle requires, well, actually… finding dark matter. They are, scientists believe, our newest lead on dark matter - perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe.ĭark matter quests that hope to unveil the strange, invisible particle or force that somehow binds the cosmos together often reach a wall.
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