Dark matter Wikipedia

what is dark matter reddit

Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be seen. Such effects occur in the context of formation and evolution of galaxies,[1] gravitational lensing,[2] the observable universe’s current structure, mass position in galactic collisions,[3] the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies. Every second, millions to trillions of particles of dark matter flow through your body without even a whisper or trace. This ghostly fact is sometimes cited by scientists when they describe dark matter, an invisible substance that accounts for about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. Unlike so-called normal matter, which includes everything from electrons to people to planets, dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or shine with any light. Astronomers indirectly detect dark matter through its gravitational influences on stars and galaxies.

Wherever normal matter resides, dark matter can be found lurking unseen by its side. So how does one go about finding a hypothetical particle less massive than a proton? Zurek and others have proposed tabletop-size experiments much smaller than other dark matter experiments, which can weigh on the order of tons. Although hidden-sector particles are thought to only rarely and weakly interact with normal matter, when they do, they cause disturbances that could, in theory, be detected. The first real evidence for dark matter came in 1933, when Caltech’s Fritz Zwicky used the Mount Wilson Observatory to measure the visible mass of a cluster of galaxies and found that it was much too small to prevent the galaxies from escaping the gravitational pull of the cluster.

At Caltech, hidden-sector ideas are in full bloom, with several scientists cultivating new theories and experiments. In principle, “dark matter” means all components of the universe which are not visible but still obey ρ ∝ a−3 . In practice, the term “dark matter” is often used to mean only the non-baryonic component of dark matter, i.e., excluding “missing baryons”. If you’re running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again.

Observational evidence

Such particles are termed “warm dark matter”, because they have lower thermal velocities than massive neutrinos … Gravitinos and photinos have been suggested (Pagels and Primack 1982; Bond, Szalay and Turner 1982) … Any particles which became nonrelativistic very early, and so were able to diffuse a negligible distance, are termed “cold” dark matter (CDM). Recently, Hopkins and his students have refined this simple simulation to include hidden-sector https://www.currency-trading.org/ physics. He says his research serves as a bridge between that of Zurek and Golwala, in that Zurek comes up with the theories, Hopkins tests them in computers to help refine the physics, and Golwala looks for the actual particles. In the galaxy simulations, the hidden sector dark matter is “harder to squish” because of its self-interacting properties, explains Hopkins, and this trait ultimately affects the properties of galaxies.

On average, superclusters are expanding more slowly than the cosmic mean due to their gravity, while voids are expanding faster than average. In a redshift map, galaxies in front of a supercluster have excess radial velocities towards it and have redshifts slightly higher than their distance would imply, while galaxies behind the supercluster have redshifts slightly low for their distance. This effect causes superclusters to appear squashed in the radial direction, and likewise voids are stretched. This effect is not detectable for any one structure since the true shape is not known, but can be measured by averaging over many structures. It was predicted quantitatively by Nick Kaiser in 1987, and first decisively measured in 2001 by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.[96] Results are in agreement with the lambda-CDM model. Sean Carroll, research professor of physics at Caltech, and his colleagues also wrote an early paper, in 2008, on the idea that dark matter might interact just with itself.

what is dark matter reddit

About 6,000 feet underground, in a working nickel mine in Ontario, Canada, a dark matter experiment is taking shape. Unlike the small experiments proposed by Zurek and others, this one is a massive undertaking. Scheduled to begin operations in 2022, SuperCDMS (Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) is designed to find lighter WIMPs than those sought before, with masses of 1 giga-eV, which is close to the mass of a proton. Because SuperCDMS is looking for lower-mass particles, it also has the ability to find lighter hidden-sector particles. Many supersymmetric models offer dark matter candidates in the form of the WIMPy Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP).[138] Separately, heavy sterile neutrinos exist in non-supersymmetric extensions to the standard model which explain the small neutrino mass through the seesaw mechanism. Possibilities range from large objects like MACHOs (such as black holes[136] and Preon stars[137]) or RAMBOs (such as clusters of brown dwarfs), to new particles such as WIMPs and axions.

This is the focus for dark matter research, as hot dark matter does not seem capable of supporting galaxy or galaxy cluster formation, and most particle candidates slowed early. Cristián Peña (MS ’15, PhD ’17), a Lederman Postdoctoral Fellow at Fermilab and a research scientist with the High Energy Physics group and INQNET (INtelligent Quantum NEtworks and Technologies) at Caltech, was among the first, in 2016, to attempt to discover dark matter in high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Those searches for dark matter were made with data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid instrument. In the past decade, another set of dark matter candidates has emerged and is growing in popularity. These candidates collectively belong to a category known as the hidden, or dark, sector.

Redshift-space distortions

Somewhat like a school of fish who swim only with their own kind, these particles would interact strongly with one another but might occasionally bump softly into normal particles via a hypothetical messenger particle. This is in contrast to the proposed WIMPs, for example, which would interact with normal matter through the known weak force by exchanging a heavy particle. The state-of-the-art sensors he is using are being developed as part of a quantum internet project involving INQNET in collaboration with Fermilab, JPL, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, among others. INQNET was founded in 2017 with AT&T and is led by Maria Spiropulu, Caltech’s Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics.

  1. Primordial density fluctuations smaller than this length get washed out as particles spread from overdense to underdense regions, while larger fluctuations are unaffected; therefore this length sets a minimum scale for later structure formation.
  2. Ordinary and dark matter perturbations, therefore, evolve differently with time and leave different imprints on the CMB.
  3. This effect causes superclusters to appear squashed in the radial direction, and likewise voids are stretched.
  4. Unlike normal matter, the hidden-sector particles would live in a dark universe of their own.

Standard physical cosmology gives the particle horizon size as 2 c t (speed of light multiplied by time) in the radiation-dominated era, thus 2 light-years. A region of this size would expand to 2 million light-years today (absent structure formation). The actual FSL is approximately 5 times the above length, since it continues to grow slowly as particle velocities decrease inversely with the scale factor after they become non-relativistic. In this example the FSL would correspond to 10 million light-years, or 3 megaparsecs, today, around the size containing an average large galaxy. Structure formation refers to the period after the Big Bang when density perturbations collapsed to form stars, galaxies, and clusters. Prior to structure formation, the Friedmann solutions to general relativity describe a homogeneous universe.

Bullet Cluster

These are predicted to arise in the Lambda-CDM model due to acoustic oscillations in the photon–baryon fluid of the early universe, and can be observed in the cosmic microwave background angular power spectrum. As the dark matter and baryons clumped together after recombination, the effect is much weaker in the galaxy distribution in the nearby universe, but is detectable as a subtle (≈1 percent) preference for pairs of galaxies to be separated by 147 Mpc, compared to those separated by 130–160 Mpc. Direct detection experiments aim to observe low-energy recoils (typically a few keVs) of https://www.forex-world.net/ nuclei induced by interactions with particles of dark matter, which (in theory) are passing through the Earth. After such a recoil the nucleus will emit energy in the form of scintillation light or phonons, as they pass through sensitive detection apparatus. To do so effectively, it is crucial to maintain an extremely low background, which is the reason why such experiments typically operate deep underground, where interference from cosmic rays is minimized. In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field.

Gravitational lensing

This is a search strategy based on the motion of the Solar System around the Galactic Center.[152][153][154][155] A low-pressure time projection chamber makes it possible to access information on recoiling tracks and constrain WIMP-nucleus kinematics. WIMPs coming from the direction in which the Sun travels (approximately towards Cygnus) may then be separated from background, which should be isotropic. Large galaxy redshift surveys may be used to make a three-dimensional map of the galaxy distribution. These maps are slightly distorted because distances are estimated from observed redshifts; the redshift contains a contribution from the galaxy’s so-called peculiar velocity in addition to the dominant Hubble expansion term.

Scientists turn to new ideas and experiments in the search for dark matter particles.

If you’re supplying an alternate User-Agent string,try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block. “At first, we called these particles hidden valleys because the idea was that you would climb a mountain pass and look down to very low-energy particles.” But now, she says, the phrase hidden valley has morphed into hidden, or dark, sectors. If Kepler’s laws are correct, then the obvious way to resolve this discrepancy is to conclude the mass distribution in spiral galaxies is not similar to that of the Solar System. In particular, there is a lot of non-luminous matter (dark matter) in the outskirts of the galaxy. One of the consequences of general relativity is massive objects (such as a cluster of galaxies) lying between a more distant source (such as a quasar) and an observer should act as a lens to bend light from this source.

Something else, concluded Zwicky, was acting like glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. In the 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, while based at the Carnegie Institution for Science, measured the rotation speeds of individual galaxies and found evidence that, like Zwicky’s galaxy cluster, dark matter was keeping the galaxies from flying apart. Other evidence throughout the years has confirmed the existence of dark matter and shown how abundant it https://www.forexbox.info/ is in the universe. Candidate particles can be grouped into three categories on the basis of their effect on the fluctuation spectrum (Bond et al. 1983). If the dark matter is composed of abundant light particles which remain relativistic until shortly before recombination, then it may be termed “hot”. A second possibility is for the dark matter particles to interact more weakly than neutrinos, to be less abundant, and to have a mass of order 1 keV.

Similar to the hidden-sector ideas, the team proposed that, “just like ordinary matter couples to a long-range force known as ‘electromagnetism’ mediated by particles called ‘photons,’ dark matter couples to a new long-range force known (henceforth) as ‘dark electromagnetism,’” Carroll wrote in his blog, Preposterous Universe, in 2008. Primordial density fluctuations smaller than this length get washed out as particles spread from overdense to underdense regions, while larger fluctuations are unaffected; therefore this length sets a minimum scale for later structure formation. Golwala helps manage the fabrication of the detector assemblies for SuperCDMS; the detectors are being built at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which leads the SuperCDMS project. Golwala explains that most dark matter experiments searching for WIMPs and hidden-sector dark matter are performed underground, often in mines, in order to shield the instruments from cosmic rays that could mask the dark matter signals. In 2006, Zurek and colleagues proposed the idea that dark matter could be part of a hidden sector, with its own dynamics, independent of normal matter like photons, electrons, quarks, and other particles that fall under the Standard Model. Unlike normal matter, the hidden-sector particles would live in a dark universe of their own.

The luminous mass density of a spiral galaxy decreases as one goes from the center to the outskirts. If luminous mass were all the matter, then we can model the galaxy as a point mass in the centre and test masses orbiting around it, similar to the Solar System.[f] From Kepler’s Third Law, it is expected that the rotation velocities will decrease with distance from the center, similar to the Solar System. This is not observed.[63] Instead, the galaxy rotation curve remains flat as distance from the center increases. Zurek and her team have proposed a way to detect a disturbance caused by the hidden sector using a type of quasiparticle called a phonon. A specialized sensor would be used to catch the phonon vibrations, indicating the presence of dark matter.

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