Dark Matter — part 1
Introduction
I’ve decided to abandon the chapter wise structure I was using for all my previous posts; I will now just write about topics that interest me. I’ve also decided to make each blog post much shorter.
Today I’ve decided to do dark matter. It is basically a buzz word in sci-fi and even in Science itself. It’s been around for quite a while but we know so little about it. So what exactly is dark matter?
“Dark Matter is everywhere. In this room. Everywhere”
- Fabiola Gianotti
It truly is fascinating that we know nothing about dark matter even though it is practically everywhere in our universe — you could argue that it is the most abundant “material” in our universe.
Dark Matter was “born” in two main time periods: Pre WWII and post WWII. It was originally discovered by a Swiss astronomer by the name of Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. He was an extremely interesting character and he was extremely influential in our study of dark matter.
Zwicky was studying the Coma Cluster, a galactic cluster (a group of galaxies bound together by gravity) about 323 million ly (99 pc) away from the Earth, he spotted an anomaly in the data. Zwicky noticed that the galaxies within this cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s mass to support it.
Zwicky thus theorised that there must be some additional mass that is unaccounted for. He called this mass dunkle materie (Dark Matter in German). In fact the mass had to be 400 times heavier for it to support the rotational velocities of these galaxies.
He thus posited the idea of dark matter. Unfortunately, the Scientific community believed that this phenomenon was unique to the Coma cluster and the idea of dark matter wasn’t generally accepted… until one fateful day in the 1970s.
Conclusion
I hope you guys enjoyed this post, it was pretty short and I’ll continue this “story” in the next post.
Citations:
- Jr, John Johnson. “Fritz Zwicky: Part Eccentric, Part Genius, Completely Uncontained.” BBC Science Focus Magazine, 8 Apr. 2020, www.sciencefocus.com/space/fritz-zwicky-part-eccentric-part-genius-completely-uncontained/.
- “APOD: 2018 March 26 — The Coma Cluster of Galaxies.” NASA, NASA, apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180326.html.
