The universe has never made things easy: every time you look away, it becomes bigger, stranger, and curiouser. And that’s only the part we can see. As you might have heard if you pay attention to these things (and will be distressed to learn if you don’t), up to 80% of the matter in the universe is simply missing. The Milky Way spins so fast it would fly apart if the gravity of some invisible matter weren’t holding it together. Clusters of galaxies, buzzing around one another like angry bees, would similarly fragment and disperse. And when you run the gravitational numbers, the mysterious matter that keeps all that cosmic disintegration from happening should outweigh the familiar stuff by about 4 to 1.It was in the 1930s that astronomer Fritz Swicky first proclaimed — to general skepticism — that what is now known commonly as dark matter must exist, surrounding most galaxies like a glass paperweight surrounds a butterfly. But not only could physicists not detect the material, they couldn’t even agree on what they should be looking for.Dark-matter particles, if they exist, might also get mingled into this cosmic flow, but theories suggest they’d be hard to spot. They can pass through ordinary matter as if it weren’t there (billions could be streaming through your body as you read these words) and they’d be utterly invisible to any sort of telescope.If we can’t detect dark matter itself, however, we might detect its byproducts. Theorists think that when two dark-matter particles meet out in space, they’ll occasionally, albeit not often, destroy each other in a tiny burst of energy. That energy would then condense back into entirely different particles: an ordinary electron and its much rarer antimatter counterpart, a positron, which would go speeding away from each other in some random direction.
So where do we come from? Are we alone in this complexity universe?The answer is in our minds!
The universe has never made things easy: every time you look away, it becomes bigger, stranger, and curiouser. And that’s only the part we can see. As you might have heard if you pay attention to these things (and will be distressed to learn if you don’t), up to 80% of the matter in the universe is simply missing. The Milky Way spins so fast it would fly apart if the gravity of some invisible matter weren’t holding it together. Clusters of galaxies, buzzing around one another like angry bees, would similarly fragment and disperse. And when you run the gravitational numbers, the mysterious matter that keeps all that cosmic disintegration from happening should outweigh the familiar stuff by about 4 to 1.It was in the 1930s that astronomer Fritz Swicky first proclaimed — to general skepticism — that what is now known commonly as dark matter must exist, surrounding most galaxies like a glass paperweight surrounds a butterfly. But not only could physicists not detect the material, they couldn’t even agree on what they should be looking for.Dark-matter particles, if they exist, might also get mingled into this cosmic flow, but theories suggest they’d be hard to spot. They can pass through ordinary matter as if it weren’t there (billions could be streaming through your body as you read these words) and they’d be utterly invisible to any sort of telescope.If we can’t detect dark matter itself, however, we might detect its byproducts. Theorists think that when two dark-matter particles meet out in space, they’ll occasionally, albeit not often, destroy each other in a tiny burst of energy. That energy would then condense back into entirely different particles: an ordinary electron and its much rarer antimatter counterpart, a positron, which would go speeding away from each other in some random direction.
So where do we come from? Are we alone in this complexity universe?The answer is in our minds!
The universe has never made things easy: every time you look away, it becomes bigger, stranger, and curiouser. And that’s only the part we can see. As you might have heard if you pay attention to these things (and will be distressed to learn if you don’t), up to 80% of the matter in the universe is simply missing. The Milky Way spins so fast it would fly apart if the gravity of some invisible matter weren’t holding it together. Clusters of galaxies, buzzing around one another like angry bees, would similarly fragment and disperse. And when you run the gravitational numbers, the mysterious matter that keeps all that cosmic disintegration from happening should outweigh the familiar stuff by about 4 to 1.It was in the 1930s that astronomer Fritz Swicky first proclaimed — to general skepticism — that what is now known commonly as dark matter must exist, surrounding most galaxies like a glass paperweight surrounds a butterfly. But not only could physicists not detect the material, they couldn’t even agree on what they should be looking for.Dark-matter particles, if they exist, might also get mingled into this cosmic flow, but theories suggest they’d be hard to spot. They can pass through ordinary matter as if it weren’t there (billions could be streaming through your body as you read these words) and they’d be utterly invisible to any sort of telescope.If we can’t detect dark matter itself, however, we might detect its byproducts. Theorists think that when two dark-matter particles meet out in space, they’ll occasionally, albeit not often, destroy each other in a tiny burst of energy. That energy would then condense back into entirely different particles: an ordinary electron and its much rarer antimatter counterpart, a positron, which would go speeding away from each other in some random direction.
So where do we come from? Are we alone in this complexity universe?The answer is in our minds!
