Some of you may not even have heard of the term dark before, let alone know what it is. To be honest I had no idea that such a thing even existed until a few years ago. Someone-- I think they were an engineer that had to do something with space, but I’m not sure-- came to our school to talk about dark matter and explain dark matter to us in a club meeting. And needless to say, I left that meeting with a lot of information that I found fascinating. That was because dark matter is so much more than what we knew about it. The most interesting part was that we didn’t know what dark matter was but we knew what it wasn’t…

 

To be able to fully (or at least to be able to try to) understand dark matter we first have to introduce some new terms into the equation: dark energy and dark matter.  The first of these key terms is dark energy; dark energy  is more of an unknown than known. According to NASA, we know how much dark energy there is in the universe because of the universe’s expansion. Other than this fact about dark energy, we pretty much don’t know anything else. However, the fact that dark energy is a mystery doesn’t make it unimportant. Apparently about 68% of the universe consists of dark energy. Also, about  27% of the universe consists of dark matter. Like dark energy, we don’t exactly know what dark matter is. However, there are several explanations/theories for it. One theory about dark matter was established by Einstein; Einstein theorized that dark matter is a property of space, and that this empty space can create its own energy. Some other explanations/theories related to dark matter are that space acquires energy from the quantum theory of matter, and there is even a theory that says that Einstein’s explanation of dark matter is not correct whatsoever.

 

Now to give a brief definition of dark matter: it is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Now be careful; 27% of the universe consists of dark matter, but 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. That does sound complicated and confusing at first, doesn’t it? However, when you think about it one percentage is about the place of dark matter in the universe and the other is about the amount of matter that exists. We don’t know what dark matter consists of other than it may be made up of subatomic particles that  haven’t been discovered yet. So, it really is a matter of what it may or may not consist of… 

 

The fact that dark matter is dark means that it’s not in the form of other stars and planets. There is not much visible dark matter that exists, since the only visible dark matter amounts to 27%. Like I said before, we don’t know what dark matter is, but we do know what it isn’t. Some things that aren’t dark matter are: dark clouds of normal matter, antimatter, and finally large galaxy-sized black holes (on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see).

 

As you can see dark matter remains as this fascinating mystery to science. The mystery of dark matter is one that we may never be able to solve. The fact that this complex theory is still largely a mystery and can’t be explained or summarized, has left a mark on me and impressed me deep down. I hope that the mysteries of our vast universe such as dark matter have the same, if not a similar, effect on you…