Dark matter is the modern fairy dust that makes everything (cosmologically) better. Upon observing that the universe would need to have several hundred times more mass than we can see to be consistent with modern theories, many scientists apparently thought "Fair enough, there must be several universes worth of invisible magic stuff hiding throughout the entirety of existence". Rather than the crazy heresy of "Maybe our theories need a little work".
Normally people who constantly look for fictional things are labeled as crazy, and this scientific search may have reached psychosis point with spiral galaxy NGC 4736. A team from the Polish Academy of Science have observed a spiral galaxy that doesn't need the dark stuff. This galaxy can be entirely explained in terms of the matter we see and the theories we have, and in a shocking reversal of the whole "Scientific Method" process other researchers are criticizing the find - because the observations don't support the invisible thing they believe in. That's not science, that's religion.
Another suspect for this maybe-missing-matter is the neutralino, and we'll have to ask you to believe us that we're not just making up words at this point. As a heavy, stable, weakly interacting particle it has all the right properties to hang back and just "be there" in the invisible way dark matter is expected to be, with only the usual slight flaw of being an utterly hypothetical string symmetric construction - but maybe not for long. NASA's gamma gazing GLAST satellite is surveying a radiation map of the sky for comparison with neutralino predictions, meaning it will be testing for dark matter, string theory and supersymmetry. No word yet on whether it's fitted with a unicorn detector too.
According to theoretical physicists, only around five percent of what makes up the universe can presently be detected. The existence of dark matter is inferred from the behavior of faraway galaxies, which move in ways that can only be explained by a gravitational pull caused by more mass than can be seen. They estimate dark matter represents around 20 percent of the universe, with the other 75 percent made up of dark energy, a repulsive force that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-quickening pace.
At the heart of the new detector -poetically called a scintillating bolometer- is a crystal so pure it can conduct the energy ostensibly generated when a particle of dark matter strikes the nucleus of one of its atoms.
To prevent interference by cosmic rays, the bolometer is shielded in lead, kept under half a mile of rock and frozen to near-absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion stops. At the edge of absolute zero, it’s possible to measure “a high heat signal" -expected changes of a few millionths of a degree Fahrenheit. Abancens said the device could be operational in five years.
Do you get the feeling that we're entering a 21st Century Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole!
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