The universe is expanding, we’ve known that for a long time. We used to think that because of the mass of the bits and bobs in the universe being pulled back together by the power of gravity, that the rate of expansion would be slowing. However in the 90’s, it was found that the rate of expansion was in fact accelerating which blew a raspberry in the faces of astrophysicists of the time. They still don’t know what’s giving the universe this extra push, but they’ve named it dark energy for now.
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So there are a few ways of trying to explain where dark energy comes from, here they are:
1) Part of Einstein’s theory of gravity has a go at explaining it. He said that space is not just empty and powerless, but that it has its own energy. The amount of space grows in size as the universe expands, so this energy becomes more abundant and powerful. The idea that space with effectively nothing in it has energy is another factor implicated in me wetting my knickers.
2) An even snazzier explanation of how empty space can have energy comes from the puzzling quantum camp. Their theory says that empty space is in fact full of “virtual” particles that appear and disappear constantly,giving ‘nothing’ energy. But when they did the maths it came out so very wrong that they pretty much dropped it. Their answer was wrong to the order of a number with 120 zeros on the end. That is very wrong indeed.
3) The third theory is simply that there is something that fills all of space but whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of matter and normal energy. They call it “quintessence”. But that doesn’t help at all, they’ve just given it a name.
4) The last theory is that Einstein’s theory of gravity is simply wrong, but his theory works well under all other conditions and no one else has any better ideas about gravity so that doesn’t help much either.
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As for dark matter, why do we think there is a need for this exotic brew? Well, there’s a few things. One reason is that the mass of some galaxies would be far too small to give them such fast orbits, so something else must be bulking them out and making them whizz about.
We know more about what dark matter isn’t than what it is. First,it’s not in the form of stars and planets that we see. We know there’s far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 25% required by the observations. Second, it’s not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter. We know that because we would be able to detect it by the absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because that stuff produces gamma rays when it smashes into matter, and we don’t see that. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes because when light goes past something massive it bends (that’s called lensing, just so you know) and we haven’t seen enough of that to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.
So what the frig is it??? Well. There’s a couple of ideas which I won’t go into in any detail as they blew my marbles. The fancy pants theories that are posed have awesome names, I’m digging the acronyms: MACHOs, RAMBOs and WIMPs, or massive compact halo objects, robust associations of massive baryonic objects and weakly interacting massive particles to give them their full and fanciful names. But all of the above particles and structures are hypothetical and all of them have their problems. It seems we’re a long way off working this one out.
However, in breaking news, some snazzy new kit welded on to the International Space Station (ISS) has come up with some tantalizing yet confusing information in the quest for the dark stuff. Here’s a young chap telling us about it. Listen good:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kEYRm4NWEY’]
If you’ve made it this far, well done, now relax and chill out with some LOLz on us:
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