Dark matter could be almost anything. With little data other than how much total dark matter mass exists, we can’t decode much about what individual chunks of dark matter might be made of. I’ve talked before about Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), but these are just two possibilities. Other theorists have talked about Modified Newtonian Gravity (MNG), where gravity may work differently on the grand scale than it does on our small Earth scales. Or perhaps it’s something I haven’t seen before. Maybe what we call dark matter is just a large population of ancient black holes....
When could the Moon possibly be brighter than the Sun? The Sun is much bigger, produces energy, and gives all the energy needed for life on Earth. But if you look at the sky in gamma rays, the highest energy photons on the electromagnetic spectrum, you’ll see the Moon more easily than the Sun. Why? The Moon is the brightest gamma ray source in the sky, because it has no atmosphere or magnetic field. Essentially it has no protection from the dangerous cosmic rays that are constantly zipping through space. When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere they create a cosmic...
The fact that we have found gravitational waves tells us that we have come a long way in terms of science and technology. We detected a perturbation in the fabric of space-time that was one one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. It’s insane to think about that level of precision. And yet we still can’t find Dark Matter, the stuff that is literally everywhere in the universe. Is it our problem? Or is dark matter just on a whole different level? By now, we know that dark matter isn’t some clump of stuff sitting out there in space. But that...
Gamma rays are the highest energy photons on the electromagnetic spectrum. Their wavelength is similar to the size of an atom, and when two of them collide they tend to produce a matter-antimatter particle pair. They represent energy high enough to synthesize the fundamental particles of matter, and are produced in the highest energy environments in the cosmos. The interchange of matter and energy works both ways, so one of the ways gamma rays are generated is through annihilation of a matter-antimatter particle pair. Looking back to the beginning of the universe it gives us the earliest ‘chicken or egg’...
Gamma rays are the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation in the universe. With wavelengths as small at atoms, they usually result from the most powerful interactions known, such as the collision of two particles, or the release of energy from the accretion disk of a black hole. But there is another potential source of gamma rays that has not yet been confirmed: Dark Matter. The leading candidate for dark matter is the theorized Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), though it is not as wimpy as its namesake suggests, making up 5 times as much mass as the visible matter...
If you look up into the sky on a clear night, you would see thousands of stars. There are surely many more that you would need a telescope to see. But there are not stars everywhere. You can zoom in further and further with bigger and bigger telescopes, until eventually you find gaps where you simply don’t see stars. For a long time it was thought that the gaps were empty, until the Hubble telescope peered through the darkness by taking a 200 hour exposure of a supposedly empty patch of sky. What it revealed was a universe full of...
Dark matter is everywhere. There is way more of it in the universe than the matter we are made of and interact with. Yet for the sheer amount of it, we have no way of determining what exactly it is. It’s as if we didn’t know what air was, and even though we could see it and breathe it, we couldn’t measure it. The most tantalizing part about dark matter is that we can see the gravitational effect it has, and so we can determine how much of it there has to be. Some places in the universe have more dark matter than...
And the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to….. Arthur B. McDonald and Takaaki Kajita for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which show that neutrinos have mass. It fills me with pride to see that a Canadian scientist can win the most distinguished award for Physics in the world, and proves that cutting edge research is done by Canadian Universities. We are an important part of the global machine that is advancing humanity’s understanding of science. So what did this East-West collaboration discover? A long Standing Problem in particle Physics, called the ‘solar neutrino problem,’ developed back in the 1960s....
You might think simulating the entire Universe is difficult, and it is, but not for the reasons you would think. The Physics is actually somewhat straightforward. We know the math behind star formation, Gravity, and fluid dynamics, and throwing in a few other effects is not too bad. The hard part is finding a computer powerful enough to do the calculations in a reasonable amount of time. Think about it. Imagine having a universe of 100 Billion ‘particles’ used for a simulation. Each particle has a starting point, and that it pretty easy to do. But then for every...
Dark Matter; Dark Energy; We basically use the term ‘dark’ as a cool sounding version of ‘We have no clue what this is.’ But Dark Matter is a better name than ‘We haven’t a clue’ Matter. Over the years, Astronomers have been trying to pinpoint what the stuff actually is that seems to permeate the universe and makes up 26.8% of the entire total energy-mass (Compare this to a paltry 4.9% of ordinary matter, ie the stuff we can see). But now, as per usual, theorists have come up with another possibility for the source of dark matter: moderately sized,...
