Dark matter is to me one of the most intriguing topics I have ever looked into. It is hard to define dark matter considering there is no hard evidence of its reality. However, there is plenty of indirect proof that displays its existence. The reason this whole notion of dark matter exists in the first place is because earlier in the twentieth century, a couple scientists noticed two significant events. One was that galaxies appeared to be moving much quicker than their visible matter would have allowed them to. Thus leading scientists to believe that there was something out there that was essentially holding the galaxies together and allowing them to move at their seemingly remarkable rate. The other finding related to the idea of Einstein’s relativity, the gravitational pull and consequently the speed of the object as it moves further from the source will lessen. However, this expectation did not hold up in that the scientists discovered that all objects, independent of their distance from the source, traveled at the same velocity. Thus, astronomers began to think that there must be something out there that equals out the gravitational force.
As I stated earlier, there is no hard evidence of dark matter. However, there are some strong implications of how it acts. Just like regular matter, all dark matter has a gravitational attraction to all other matter, dark or regular. However, it does not interact with light except that it bends it, like a mirror bends light. This process is known as gravitational lensing. This allows us to see the deflections in light and map out where the dark matter is. Also, we believe dark matter could be made of these new particles known as wimps. These particles are so small that billions of them pass through you every second. They travel very slow and go straight through regular matter.
Some other interesting facts about dark matter are that dark matter is the scaffolding for the universe and regular matter. Essentially, regular matter is attached dark matter. One other intriguing piece of information is that the universe is only made of four percent of regular matter and twenty three percent of dark matter. The other seventy three percent is dark energy...