So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. It's kind of annoying. But we desperately need it in our calculations to arrive at an accurate description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations on concepts we don't understand, but we'll do it if we have to. And dark matter is not our first rodeo.
What's the matter? Dark matter! The most mysterious substance in the universe, so mysterious we're not even sure it exists. But if it DOES exist, it explains an awful lot... so new experiments are underway in some of the most unlikely places. Our massive feature reveals all! Plus...
A massive cosmic cataloguing effort released a new crop of star and galaxy data last week, noting the locations and brightnesses of hundreds of thousands of objects. Now you can fly through some of them in this new video - click past the jump for a "flight through the universe."
The hunt for dark matter is arguably the biggest scientific search ongoing right now - even as scientists close in on the elusive Higgs boson - but finding it is not proving easy, since physicists can't see or measure the stuff, or even be sure that it's there at all (it is, after all, theoretical at this point). To find it, a notable collaboration of astrophysicists and geneticists is gathering to build one of the most far-out particle detectors we've come across in recent memory: a dark matter detector made out of DNA.
Is dark matter in danger? A few days after scientists said there's no dark matter near our sun, a team of researchers in Germany now says there's no dark matter in our galactic neighborhood. The team found a vast structure of globular clusters and satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way in a smooth, evenly distributed pattern. Most models of galactic distribution and evolution require the gravitational effects of dark matter, but in this model, it doesn't seem to exist.
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