Sunday, October 31, 2010

Dark matter-The hunt for invisible

Have you ever wondered what you are running through when you wave your hand out there in free space or air for that matter. Well you are here to know a possible answer to it. Some say it is air, some say it is ether and some say it is nothing. Science is something that is governed by laws and all observations and their relevant theories should complement one another. If the answer to the question at the outset is nothing then, one has to explain how that 'nothing' is able to hold up 'something' around it.

Well well!! Iam certainly not here to confuse you all, so don't worry. I put up a small little hypothesis which will make you think and rethink or possibly accept it.

Law of Gravitation, a very famous law, governs everything in this universe. You can realise this fact on the large scale very easily. Attraction among planets hold them to orbits, attraction among celestial objects making them cling around a mass and what not.

Well the outer space as generally perceived consists of no 'real' matter and is hugely 'empty'. If one googles the word spiral galaxies or cosmic clusters or asteroids and look at their relative shapes over a period of time, it is not hard to recognise that they donot change much.

It is very puzzling to all of us about the apparent lack of mass out there in cosmos. The trouble is that galaxies donot have enough visible mass to hold them together by gravitation. Hence they ought to fly apart.

This is where the idea of dark matter comes from. Some kind of force must be holding galaxies together. So astrophysicists imagine that galaxies must be filled with invisible, dark matter that provides the necessary extra tug. But to generate enough gravity, dark matter must be vastly more common than the stuff we can see. We must be swimming in it but unable to detect it for some reason. At least not easily.

Now that dark matter has been proposed, start skimming through the free space and see if you can see the unseen!!

No comments:

Post a Comment