Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Dark Matter

BY: Joshua Pittman

Space has always been one thing that humans have tried to observe and make sense of. One of the recent trends among scientists around the world is trying to invent various methods in order to understand more about dark matter as well as present it in a visible form for study and experiment purposes. According to scientists, 27% of the known universe is Dark Matter. So what is dark matter, you ask? For starters it is not any of the visible stars or planets or even in the form of normal matter or antimatter. There are many things that it is not and it is commonly suggested that it is made up of exotic particles, but one thing is certain and that it is there even though humans cannot visibly see or capture it.

Researchers at MIT have recently invented a tool that they confirm will modify a particle accelerator to perform the tests necessary to see if dark matter takes the form of a photon-like particle that has “mass”. This experiment will also help find two particles that dark matter may decay into.

The study of dark matter will be an important if not historical for our species in order to learn more about the vast new frontier known as space and this study may as well help with future travel through the stars including ways to one day reach warp travel so that the ability to study other planets with our own eyes will one day come.

Here are a few links pertaining to dark matter:
“A NASA Chief Weighs In On Possible Dark Matter Discovery” (article)

An online article explaining what is Dark Matter and Dark Energy (article)

“MIT has built a dark-matter hunter out of a modified particle accelerator” (article)


A Lesson by James Gillies-Dark Matter: The matter we can’t see



Michelle Thaller talks about dark matter



8 comments:

  1. I have always been interested in the existence of materials beyond our solar system. Dark matter or dark energy poses to be a popular topic amongst scientists because it is not visible, composes about 68% of the galaxy, and is detected by baryons which are read through the clouds. being a descendant of the big bang according to most scientists, this matter of energy has been detected to be in the far outreaches of our galaxy. It will be interesting to see the effect that dark matter has as it continues to traverse systems. How will our solar system interact with dark matter? Apparently, over 100 million years ago our solar system in its prestages interacted with another system composed of dark matter. Nevertheless, many spectators do not want scientists to confuse dark matter with invisible energy. Although there are many detailed accounts, one must bring to the forefront, are we waisting our money and energy researching the wrong information? Dark holes for example, pose to be an even bigger threat to our system than dark matter, but is rumored to be thousands of light years away.

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  2. I have always been interested in dark matter. I gained a lot of insight from this article on the subject.

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  3. Great Article ! Even better videos. I personally believe life exist not just on earth.

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  4. wow this was really interesting, Ive never really thought much on dark matter but because of this I really want to start looking into it.

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  5. I thought this going to be weird but it was actually cool though. Great post!

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  6. Until now I didn't have a good understanding of Dark Matter. This program gave a good in depth tour of it, while explaining in a highly detailed manner.

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  7. I would have never known about Dark matter if it hadn't been for this article. Thanks for the insight, I'll be sure to share it with others.

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  8. This is very new to me, and pretty jarring to the mind. I would like to see this information looked into by the geniuses in the white lab coats because sometimes digging too deep you'll find something you don't want to know! Nice post.

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