Have you ever wondered what the universe is composed of? When you look at the sky at night, on a clear day, you see stars flickering like lanterns. What about the darkness that makes the flickering lanterns visible to you?
Ironically, what you cannot see makes up 96% of the universe. The evidence for this invisible entity is the force of gravity (and other forces) felt by the visible entity that makes up the remaining 4 percent.
The invisible 96 percent of the universe can be separated into 26 percent dark matter and 70 percent dark energy. Dark matter has been attributed to the deceleration of the expanding universe 7 billion years ago whereas dark energy is thought to be responsible for the present acceleration of the universe. The composition of dark energy and dark matter have yet to be determined
The cytoskeleton of the Universe, composed of dark matter, energy and stars, will take years of meticulous research to be comprehended completely.
Part of the difficulty encountered in research of the 'dark and mysterious' is that in order to study it, it must first be found. Astronomers have had trouble localizing dark matter and dark energy in the universe because neither absorb or emit light.
Dark matter behaves like ordinary matter in that it forms gravitationally attractive clusters with one another. There are several different types of dark matter with names such as cold dark matter, weakly interacting massive particles and repulsive dark matter.
A recent technological leap called weak gravitational lensing now is shedding light on dark matter by outlining changes in the positions of galaxies caused by interactions with dark matter.
A sibling of weak lensing is strong lensing, where the probing is directed toward gravitational bending experienced and light intensifications shown by the galaxies. These effects are realized via pictures taken of distant galaxies that demonstrate possible patterns of distortion in their positions (an effect of interactions with dark matter).
In hypothetical situations, without such interactions, galaxy orientations should be statistically random because of their general spherical shapes. The patterns of distortions, once deciphered, can be translated into a plot of all the matter between each galaxy and Earth.
Another emergent technology, which takes lensing into account, is called 3D mass tomography and aims to correlating distortion patterns of galaxies with their distance from Earth. Supposedly, the larger the distance, the more light bends. The 2D surfaces are converted into 3D volumes and the zones of dark clusters can be illustrated.
Unlike both dark and ordinary matter, dark energy does not cluster; it is uniformly distributed in the universe due to its repulsive nature. This mysterious form of energy is of tremendous significance because of its toll on the fabric of our universe. Dark energy can theoretically override gravity and act as a sort of antigravity.The result would be disastrous for our world.
From a quantum mechanics perspective, the effects of dark matter can be compared to those of an active pressure within a vacuum.In this model, as the universe continues to expand, dark energy exerts an increasing amount of pressure, eventually conflicting with the gravitational forces that hold galaxies together.
So one possibility is that the demise of the universe will be the victory of dark energy over gravity and the disintegration of galaxies as their forces fail. Although this pessimistic ending is plausible, we can be optimistic in that science will discover a solution using data from times when gravity was winning the battle with dark energy.
The third component of the invisible part of our universe is composed of dark stars called black holes that are common in parts of the universe that we have uncovered thus far. Black holes are places that contain a singularity beyond which nothing, not even the fastest traveler light can escape. A way to perceive this singularity is to imagine kicking a soccer ball up into the sky from Earth. The reason it falls back down is because the velocity at which you kicked the ball did not exceed Earth's escape velocity (~ 25,000 mph). Since the speed of light is apparently less than a black hole's escape velocity and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, nothing can escape from a black hole.
There are three populations of black holes. One kind of black holes is formed from massive star collapse and is known as stellar-mass black holes. There is evidence of black holes lying at the center of galaxies with masses exceeding billions of solar masses. These constitute the population of supermassive black holes. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is an example of a supermassive black hole. The last population lies in the middle and is called intermediate-mass black holes.
Research in such obscure fields is significant in ways that are not easily appreciated. To the general public, dark matter, energy and stars may seem as distant and alien as the opposite end of the universe (assuming that there is such an end). To the astronomers and astrophysicists, this dark entity will provide answers to fundamental questions about space-time, extra dimensions, structure of matter, etc. Most importantly, it has the potential to brighten the future and reveal the fate of our dark and mysterious universe.
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