DARK MATTER

Most of the people might get shocked to know that the baryonic matter, all the normal matter
around us, accounts for only 5 percent of the mass of the observable universe. Then what about
the remaining 95 % ? Well, it’s here all around us, might be passing through your body as you
are reading this but we can’t see it,neither can our telescopes. We have no technological
instrument that can detect or see this strange and mysterious matter. Wait, what? Then how do
we know it’s there and what exactly is it composed of? Well, this is exactly what you will get to
know if you are patient enough to read this article till the last line.

HOW DO WE KNOW IT’S THERE?

The most important thing to know is why there was a need for this unseen matter?
Cosmologists observed that the matter present in the galaxies was not enough to keep them
from flying apart. It’s the gravitational force of attraction of all the masses that keeps the
galaxies bound together but when the total mass was found, it was noted that it was far less
than what was required to hold the galaxy together. There must be more matter, other than what
we can see, paving the way for the possible existence of some unseen matter, named Dark
Matter.
Another important method for investigating further about Dark Matter is Gravitational lensing.
Gravitational Lensing: The curvature of space-time near any gravitating mass deflects
light, observably shifting, distorting and magnifying the images of background galaxies.
When this experiment was carried out, to the great astonishment of the astronomers, it was
found out that the passing light rays were way more deflected than they should have been,
according to the total mass in the galaxy. And there was only one plausible explanation: There
must be more matter in the galaxy than our eyes can see and our instruments can detect.

Galaxy Rotation Curves

In the 1960s, On one clear and dark night, Astronomer Vera Rubin at the Kitt Peak Observatory
in the mountains of southern Arizona observed the spectra of stars in the Andromeda Galaxy to
determine their velocities. The main aim of her and her colleague Kent Ford’s observation was
to determine how fast the stars rotate around their galactic core (center of the galaxy) .
But the surprises came very quickly. It was observed that the stars in the outer spiral of the
galaxy were rotating nearly as fast as the stars near the galactic center. But that shouldn’t have
been the case since most of the mass of the galaxy was concentrated in the center and the
mass was decreasing at the outer edges. It was apparently violating Newton’s laws of motions
which all the planets obey.In Newton’s and Einstein’s theories, the gravitational attraction of a
massive object drops in proportion to the square of the distance away from it. This means the
stars orbiting the galactic center should feel less gravitational pull and orbit more slowly - the
farther they are from the galactic centre.Hence, there must have been more mass at the edges
of the galaxy, giving an extra gravitational acceleration to their outlying stars. Although the
explanation for this strange phenomenon didn’t become clear to Rubin until two years later,
these printouts represented the very first direct evidence of the unseen and mysterious matter.

PERCENTAGE OF DARK MATTER

Scientists now agree that the universe comprises 5% normal baryonic matter, 27% dark matter
and 68% of dark energy.

WHAT IS DARK MATTER MADE UP OF?

We don’t know yet.
And the biggest hurdle in our way is that this matter does not absorb or reflect light, neither does
it interact with baryonic matter, the only way of communication is through gravity.
Certain theories suggested that it might be large galaxy-sized black holes but we can rule out
this theory by measuring how much gravitational lenses we see. We don't see enough
gravitational lensing events to suggest that black holes make up the required 25% dark matter
contribution.

MACHOs

Massive Compact Halo Objects are objects that range from small stars to black holes. There is
still a possibility of dark matter being made up of normal baryonic matter in the form of brown
dwarfs or in small , dense chunks of heavy elements. Hence MACHOs can be black holes,
Neutron stars or brown dwarfs. Neutron stars are very massive and if they are isolated, can be
dark.
Brown dwarfs have a mass less than eight percent of the sun, a mass too small to produce
nuclear reactions that make the stars shine. While astronomers have observed brown dwarfs ,
they have still not found evidence for a plethora of them that can account for the missing 25% of
matter.

WIMPs

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are another candidate for dark matter. They are
subatomic particles which are not made up of baryonic matter, they can pass through ordinary
matter without any effects. They can be neutrinos, axions or neutralinos.
It is noted that neutrinos do not have enough mass to be a major component of Dark Matter
while Axions and Neutrinos are still hypothetical particles.
Regina Caputa, an astrophysicist at NASA said, “ We don’t know. We don’t know what it is. It’s
not made up of normal matter like protons, electrons or neutrinos. We know it’s stable. We know
it’s not charged. We have a range of masses that it can be. But beyond that, we haven’t figured
it out yet.”
INFORMATION THEORY

The story doesn't end here. While astronomers and physicists are trying to resolve the mystery
of dark matter, there is yet another claim which shouldn’t go unnoticed . It states that dark
matter is nothing but information and information has mass.
This idea that information is the building block of the universe is quite old and was first given by
Claude Elwood Shannon in the mid-20th century.
Melvin Vopson says that information is not just the building block, but it also has mass and
energy. He unifies special relativity with the Landauer Principle according to which erasing even
one bit of information would release a tiny amount of heat that can be calculated. According to
Vopson, Information is physical. This leads to the idea of mass-energy-information equivalence
according to which a bit of information is energy, so it must have mass as well.
To measure the mass of digital information, we need a highly sensitive machine, which would be
an interferometer; something akin to LIGO.But such an ultra-accurate mass measurement
device, as the paper published by Vopson describes, doesn't exist yet. If Vopson somehow
succeeds in proving this theory, it would be something historic ; he would have discovered the
fifth state of matter: Information!
But where’s the connection to dark matter? Vopson said, “ For over 60 years, we have been
trying to detect, isolate or understand the mysterious dark matter. If information indeed has
mass, a digital informational universe would contain a lot of it, and perhaps this missing dark
matter could be information.”

As for now, we have no reason to prefer one theory and not the other because there isn't
enough evidence to accept or deny any of the theories. Scientists are working hard to get
answers but we’ll have to be patient because it’s science and it takes time.