![]() It doesn’t because of the presence of a huge halo of invisible material that surrounds galaxies.Īnother indirect proof: light emitted by faraway galaxies is deviated by the gravity of those masses it encounters in its path, although much more so than the gravity of visible masses should do. Scientists didn’t call the 'substance' dark matter without reason: it doesn’t emit traditional electromagnetic radiation – it’s dark, invisible, but interacts gravitationally with its environment just like ordinary matter.Ī half century of inquiry has led researchers to find several indirect proofs of its existence, such as galaxy rotation: stars at the edge move almost at the same speed as those closer to the centre, whereas speed should decrease with distance. The first, of which we and stars are made, represents about 15% of the universe’s matter. In the almost 50 years since, matter has been a dual concept: on the one hand ordinary matter (also called baryonic because it’s composed essentially of baryonic particles, including protons and neutrons) and on the other dark matter. ![]() ![]() Rather than continue to search for new, hypothetical particles for dark matter, Sébastien Clesse suggests that it could be made of primordial black holes, citing seven supporting observations that hint at their existence.1īeginning in the 1930s, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky drew his colleagues’ attention to the problem of 'missing' mass in the cluster of galaxies of Coma Berenices, but wasn’t until 1970 that the American astronomer Vera Rubin hypothesised that the ‘missing’ mass was ‘dark matter’. For several decades, astrophysicists have suspected the existence of so-called dark matter, constituting the bulk of all matter in the universe, but have not detected it directly.
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