If you’ve been to New York City or even the other side of the world, you’ve probably seen the famous sky. It’s so bright and clear that you can easily see the stars and planets that are thousands of light-years away from us. But the stars and planets are all a few hundred to a thousand times further away than we are.
Scientists are working to put a pin in the matter to pin down exactly what makes the universe so dense. But the most common explanation involves “dark matter” – a mysterious type of matter that scientists think is made of invisible particles, and which makes up a large chunk of everyday matter in the universe. But the universe is far too big for there to be a large amount of dark matter, and so scientists are looking for other possible answers.
Well, there’s this theory that a vast amount of dark matter could be made of neutrinos. Neutrinos are one of the tiniest particles in the universe — only 0.1 millionth of a billionth the size of a proton — and are more abundant than the rest of the known particles. This could also be why dark matter would be so dense. Because, according to the theory, the dark matter particles would move very slowly through the universe.
One of the most interesting ways to look at neutrinos is to look at how they interact with matter, which is a process called weak interaction. This is when neutrinos and other subatomic particles interact with atoms like hydrogen and other light elements. The neutrinos can decay into other particles and so this causes the mass to decrease.
Dark matter is dark because it is not made up of other particles that are made up of other particles. As such, the particles may be moving too slowly to notice, however if you look at how many particles per particle of dark matter, it’s just a lot. Theoretical physicists have predicted that there are billions of these particles, and it’s likely that they are moving at the same rate as our neutrinos.
In fact, the theory of dark matter and dark energy predicts that the universe is filled with very little mass. Dark matter and dark energy are theoretical and so they are not really known at all, so in fact, they might not be even known to the scientists. To me, they are more a mystery than a problem in the universe.
My idea for a theory of dark matter would be something like: If you were the only person alive on Earth who could see photons, then you would have a mass of a billion times that of the rest of the universe.
In fact, dark matter is just a fancy word for dark energy. It is a different force that pulls galaxies apart and makes them seem so far away and smaller than they are. And the fact that it doesn’t affect the whole universe but just those of us who live on this planet is the biggest mystery of all. I mean, if dark matter was the one we lived with all the time, then we are the only people alive on the planet.
Just make sure your computer is connected to the internet.
We all know dark matter is the stuff that makes up galaxies and our galaxies are made up of superclusters of galaxies. But what we don’t know is how our universe started. Scientists tell us that the first stars and galaxies, they just kind of appeared in the sky. And then when the universe got hot and dense, the first galaxies collapsed to form. And then that whole process of inflation must have happened. But I wonder if that’s all we have to go on.