Dark matter doesn’t absorb or emit light, but it gravitates. Instead of something exotic and novel, could it just be dark, normal matter?
Out there in the Universe, our cosmic inventory is divided up into two categories:
- normal stuff, which includes all the known, discovered particles of the Standard Model and everything they compose,
- and dark stuff, which appears to come in the forms of dark matter, which clumps and gravitates, and dark energy, which dominates the expansion of the Universe.
While normal matter makes up all the things we’ve ever directly detected and interacted with, including atoms, gas, dust, plasma, stars, planets, black holes, neutrinos, light, and even gravitational waves, that only sums up, in total, to about 5% of the total energy of the Universe. The overwhelming majority of the cosmic energy budget comes to us in the form of dark stuff, with dark energy (68%) dominating dark matter (27%) for the past few billion years.
Even though dark energy and dark matter dominate most of the Universe, we’ve only ever detected them indirectly, leading many to doubt, or at least question, their existence. That’s what Richard Whitrock is…
