Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for lecture 3.2 (part I)

Dark Matter & Dark Energy (part I)

John Peacock
[Please note, some of the text in this transcript makes implicit or explicit
reference to the whiteboard in the corresponding video lecture.]
What Id like to do now, is say a bit more about dark matter and dark energy,
and how we infer their existence and properties from observations in
cosmology. And this all starts with Friedmanns equation. As I told you, he
was the first to understand the full dynamics of the expanding universe. And
what he found was that those dynamics are the same as familiar systems. So
for example, let me take this pen and throw it up. Initially, it moves quickly,
then it moves slowly. Its kinetic energy is reducing but its total energy is
conserved. So it transforms kinetic energy into potential energy. Thus. We
can say kinetic plus potential is a constant, total energy. Friedmanns
equation for the whole universe, has no more content than that. So, if youll
forgive me, because astronomers really love equations. Im going to write it
down just to convince you that it really is quite a simple thing to deal with.
And if youre not mathematical then, all Im doing is writing this in other
language. What I need is to symbolize R of t, by which I mean the size of the
universe. I wont be specific about precisely what that means. The kinetic
term corresponds to how fast the universe is getting bigger. So in calculus
notation, thats dR by dt, but it just means a kind of speed for the whole
universe. And square it. Then something that involves the gravitational
constant. The density. Of the whole universe, times a scale factor squared
divided by 3, is equal to a constant. And this constant, according to general
relativity comes from the curvature. So, Friedmanns equation involves the
rate of expansion of the universe, the density of whats in it and the
curvature. So, K would be 0 for a flat universe, as it seems to be. So, what
that means, is we can observe how the universe expands over time. This can
tell us two great things. It can tell us the density of the universe as a function

of time. And it can tell is whether the universe is curved. So that sounds
almost too good to be true. The question is how do we figure out how the
size of the universe changes with time?
So, how do we measure the expansion history of the universe? One way of
looking at this is to go back to Hubbles Law. And say that we need the
Hubble constant as a function of time, because that governs the rate of
expansion of the universe, which is what we need. That means, since we can
observe spectroscopic red shifts, we just need some means of inferring the
distance to objects seen at great light travel times. Measuring distances in
cosmology is, is a real challenge, because everything is so far away. The
standard technique is known under the strange name of Standard Candles.
Imagine you had a very powerful light bulb that you knew was of uniform
output. If its nearby, its very intense. As you take it further away, this
intensity would fade so that the relative intensity that you observe is a direct
guide to the distance. In fact, you would say that the, the flux of light,
symbolized by F, its just proportional to 1 over the distance squared, if you
can astronomical objects that all emit the same amount of energy. A very
good candidate for these emerged during the 1990s, Supernovae, SNE for
short. Which are exploding stars around one cell of mass, in the case of type
IA. And these all empirically have very nearly the same energy output. So we
can use them to measure distances. And therefore empirically one can map
out the relationship between distance and red shift in cosmology, normally
symbolized z, but this just means the small distances the recessional
velocity in units of the speed of light. Hubbles Law says this is linear. But at
large distances, this has some curvature. And its the curvature of this
relation that represents the change of H with t. And this is what lets us
measure how the universe has changed its expansion over history. The
conclusion is that you can only match the data that we have with
Friedmanns equation if the density of the universe consists of a number of
different ingredients. There has to be about 70% dark energy. And dark
energy remember is something that doesnt change in its density with time,
and about 30% matter. But this in itself is broken into about 25% dark
matter, and about 5% of ordinary matter, atomic matter. This is the 5% that
we got from nuclear reactions. So, strangely, the total adds up to
approximately omega equals one. And therefore, the universe is flat. But
most of its contents are not the ordinary atomic material that we see.

So the expansion history from supernovae is one powerful piece of

evidence for an accelerating universe. Another way we can learn about this,
and to learn more about the existence of dark matter, comes from studying
structure in the universe. And what I mean by this, is looking at the
distribution of the building blocks of the universe, that is the galaxies.
Which you want to do in three dimensions. We do this very simply just using
Hubbles Law. So we measure the velocity, that gives us a radial distance. So
we can immediately take a set of galaxies observed on the sky, and figure
out how far away each one of them is. So that means take a picture of the
sky, take say some, narrow strip on it, and now expand this in the radial
direction using Hubbles law. What this allows you to do, is then cut out a
kind of pizza slice out of the universe, where this is the radius D and the
galaxies are spread out in distance and in direction on the sky. Now what we
find is that there are patterns in this distribution. Colossal patterns. The
galaxies tend to make up chains, filaments of galaxies, connected together,
surrounded by voids, where theres very few galaxies. These patterns are
exquisite, and these structures are huge. They might be 100 million light
years across. They must be some relic from an early phase of the universe.
Which tells us a great deal about how the universe got to be the way it is.
But for the moment, what Im interested in is using these patterns as a way
of diagnosing the presence of dark matter.
So where does the structure from? In part, the answer is gravity. Wherever
theres more matter than average, it will suck further matter in, and
computer simulations of this process, give us images that look very like the
galaxies surveys. So we know gravitys at work here. Now this is useful,
because the operation of gravity has changed over the history of the
universe. If I plot density, this is time. In the past, the density of matter was
higher, because the universe was smaller. Today, theres radiation, whose
energy density is much less than that of matter. The microwave background
is almost negligible. But it becomes more important as we go back into the
hot, big bang, and there is a cross over time, and this is somewhere around
100,000 years. Before that the energy density in the universe was
dominated by radiation. One can see the time that this occurred in the
detailed properties of the, the fluctuations that the galaxies obey in space.
And also, if we change the amount of matter, make it, less, that transition
occurs at a later time. And so the corresponding length scale, the speed of
light times the time would be larger. So we find written in the sky some

information about the matter density from the so called large scale
structure. So by mapping the three dimensional distribution of galaxies,
were able to infer the density of the universe. And this is where the
contribution of matter that is not dark energy, because this is only matter
that can clump. So, the fact that this is greater than the material, of ordinary
atomic material that we infer from say nuclear synthesis, tells us that the
majority of the clumpable matter in the universe is of a form that we only
see through gravity, we dont see from radiation, so this is dark matter.
The large scale structure is probably the most accurate way of measuring
the total amount of dark matter, but we can see its influence much more
directly. For example, in galaxy rotation curves. So if I have a galaxy, like the
Milky Way, stars and gas orbit around the centre. And if you plot, this orbital
velocity. This is the radius from the centre of the galaxy. You might expect to
find something like this. Where the velocity declines once you reach the
edge of the visible galaxy, and youve run out of matter. Now, youre just
further away from what matter there is. But the data actually tend to stay flat,
so this is the visible matter, and so the difference is dark. So, apparently the
outskirts of galaxies are dominated by dark matter. And thats one of the
most direct pieces of evidence that we have for its existence. If a structure in
the galaxy distribution grew over time under the action of gravity, we should
be able to see that. And this is possible using the microwave background.
So, here we are, observing the last scattering surface at the time of 400
thousand years. The seeds for the large scale structure should be in place,
already. So, there should be regions that the density that are higher than
average. And from these we get more radiation than in between. So
fluctuations in the intensity of radiation are expected on the sky. And these
were first seen in 1992. And the fluctuations at about 1 part in 100,000.
Slightly hotter, slightly colder, all across the sky. And these patches that we
see are about 1 degree across. This allows us to learn something about the
curvature of the universe, because if I observe the sky in a closed universe,
then the light rays would tend to reconverge. And this is just like what would
happen on the Earth. Two people set out from the North Pole along great
circles. By the time they come to the South Pole, their paths have
reconverged. The curved space brings light rays together, positively curved
space. Negatively curved space would open them up. Whereas a flat
universe is in between, and therefore the size of the spots of the microwave
sky can be used to distinguish between the closed case and the open case.

And they favour the flat case. So, therefore, we see overall that the total
density of the universe is 1. They already had matter contribution of 0.3, and
so this tells us that something else that doesnt clump must be the vacuum
energy as about 70% of the content.
This argument was already made in about 1990. The interesting thing is,
very few members of the astronomical community believed it. And its worth
asking why this was. The answer is that to anybody be they a scientist or not,
believing that weve proved that the energy density of the vacuum is nonzero, is such a radical step, that youre very reluctant to take it with out
further evidence. But then, at the end of the 1990s the evidence from
supernova came along and gave us the same conclusion. Now we had two
arguments that both call for the existence of dark energy. And so almost
overnight this became a new standard model. The burden of evidence was
so strong, that a new paradigm was established.

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