“There is probably no way to tell whether the mysteries faced by cosmologists today are the signs of a coming scientific revolution or merely the last few loose ends of an incredibly successful scientific endeavor. There is no question that we have made incredible progress in understanding our universe, its history, and its origin,” says Dan Hooper, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory about 40 miles west of Chicago and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
“The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in science and we need to use any related new data to tackle it,” says astronomer Avi Loeb with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dark matter is “dark” in the sense that it hardly interacts with anything, particularly with light. While dark matter may be too elusive to be found in particle experiments, it can reveal its presence in astronomical observations.
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
One new theory, says physicist Michio Kaku, is that the as yet undetected dark matter of the universe may be ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies in a parallel universe. “If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension,’ says Kaku, “we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.”
Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
