Dark Universe

I have written before (“The Dark Stuff,” 10/7/08) about the fact that scientists who study our universe (cosmologists and astronomers) are sort of befuddled by the fact that only a small fraction of the composition of our cosmos is visible to us. In fact, recent results published by researchers using the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft have nailed down the conundrum with accuracy—telling us that only 5% of the universe is visible matter. The other 95% is made up of so-called dark matter (27%) along with dark energy (68%).

It's a bummer to be part of what we consider to be advanced science, but are able to identify only one-twentieth of reality. What's the rest? Where is it? What are its properties? Why is it not visible? How do you try to describe something that you know impacts your world—and you can even quantify that impact by its effect on visible matter—but find impossible to detect directly? It's like watching your easy chair on Halloween Eve levitate on its own and having no idea what causes it. And since you're a scientist, you can't come up with supernatural forces as an explanation, so you’re stumped!

OK, so 95% of the universe is invisible and is causing serious gravitational influence on the stuff we can see. But we'd still like to think that the real interesting stuff going on is happening with the 5% we can see... the part that's us. That's where stars and planets and people do their fascinating things. All that dark stuff does seem to be out there, but it must really be rather dull; it's probably some type of formless cloud or invisible glue that holds together all the things we can see… nothing more. Our bewilderment about the dark stuff makes us want to minimize and simplify its qualities, just like the ancients thought that those points of light in the night sky were just specks of light, nothing more. We humans have a way of denigrating things that we are ignorant of.

Hold on though: recent observations by a couple of astronomical teams suggest that the dark matter may be more than just a bland soup of strange particles. It may be more than just a diffuse cloud sitting out there, with enough mass to alter our universe's movement. In fact, it just may be its own peculiar kind of matter—though invisible to us—that moves around on its own and clumps together in various ways; just like the 5% of stuff that makes up us. In fact, it just may be that the dark matter has been able to form its own universe of dark stars, dark planets, and even dark life!

These recent observations have a few astronomers buzzing about the strange possibilities. Some of them think that we may be coexisting with a dark universe that is twenty times heavier and bulkier than we are, but unable to see it—like ghosts who drift through the wall in the hallway.

One scientist—with a sense of humor about the conundrum—has made up a fanciful tale about a Professor Dark Matter, an astronomer in the Dark Universe. From his recent observations, he's formulated a theory of a missing ingredient in his universe that's much lighter than reality (it’s only 5%), and that he's dubbed “visible matter.” So far, however, his unorthodox ideas have just earned him ridicule from his colleagues.