All that we see and experience in a normal day is made of matter. The thing that makes up the universe and all the rest — everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter — adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. More is unknown than is known. However, this is only a small amount of the actual universe, the rest of it is made up of two invisible substances called dark matter and dark energy. We will be trying to explain dark matter, but keep in mind that this is the short version.

Dark matter is not antimatter. Antimatter will annihilate regular matter when they come in contact. Dark matter is not dark energy. Dark energy is a supposed energy that is constantly created as the universe expands. So what is dark matter?

Well, you can’t see it and this ‘thing’ does not interact with regular matter in any meaningful way other than the gravity. However, it accounts for about 23% of the universe, so how do we know it’s there? Well the amount of mass that we can see and galaxies and stars clusters are not enough to produce the amount of gravity needed to pull things around.

Stars and galaxies would be expected to orbit slower the further they are from the center, but in fact, they’re orbit at around the same speed, so there must be extra mass distributed throughout the galaxy that we can’t see. And gravitational lensing, the effect of gravity distorting lights. We can see areas where light is being affected by gravity with no visible source of the distortion. In all cases, there must be something else there, something we can’t see, something dark.

Dark matter explains all of these by counting for missing amounts of mass that we can’t see but must exist. But what exactly is the dark matter made of? That’s a good question. With… an unsatisfactory answer… we don’t know, but we have some ideas.

We have massive compact halo object, or MACHOs… and weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs. These two particles try to explain what dark matter is made up.

MACHOs are large objects that exist at the edge of galaxies and possibly a part of neutron and dwarf stars or even black holes. WIMPs are very massive but neutral particles with such low interaction with ordinary matter that’s very difficult to detect.

WIMps particles seem to be the most likely candidate for the search of dark matter… and that what people looking for… detection experiments. By looking for the products of wimps annihilation with large telescopes and detectors. The problem is dark matter is still largely a mystery! Although its may seem solid and candid now, tomorrow, something else may be discovered eliminating the need for dark matter.



