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4. Something
missing
Cosmologists had figured out how
the most complex things were created, but unknown to them their
story of how we came to be lacked a crucial ingredient –
a substance that had filled the universe since the very beginning
and had completely evaded their detection.
Back in the 1930s, a few number-crunching astronomers recognised
that galaxies should have been thrown apart by their own masses,
had they not been held together by something more than the gravitational
pull of all visible matter. For decades they were reluctant
to take the idea on board: that the gravitational forces in
galaxies couldn’t have been sufficient to hold them together.
There must have been something else; some kind of ‘cosmic
glue’. Astronomers eventually
called this cosmic glue ‘dark matter’. They deduced
that the majority of the universe is not atomic at all, in
fact nearly 85% of it is made from this mysterious dark matter.
What they couldn’t work out is how it was involved in
the story of our creation.
Unlike atoms, we know relatively little about dark matter.
It passes straight through atomic matter and emits no light
or radiation, making it very difficult to detect or measure.
So far we only know it exists from its gravitational pull.
But it was this extra gravity that had been lacking from the
cosmologists’ creation story all along. Max Tegmark
says it’s now clear that we need dark matter and its
gravitational pull to form things like galaxies. If it weren’t
for this extra pull we wouldn’t be here today.
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