DARK ENERGY

& DARK MATTER

WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE MADE OF?

• The universe is made out of tiny particles.

• Matter is composed of atoms of the elements in the periodic table.
• The universe:
- 5% stuff we know
- 27% Dark matter
- 68% Dark energy.
WHAT IS DARK MATTER?
• 27% of our universe.
• An undetected form of mass that emits little or no photons,
• but we know it must exist because we observe the effects of its
gravity.
• Our matter, “normal matter”, the one we’re familiar with, is
quite rare in the universe.
• Dark mattrr is everywhere.
 THE FATHER OF DARK
MATTER THE MOTHER OF DARK MATTER

In 1933, Fritz Zwicky checked out the Coma
Cluster. The galaxies were flying around too
fast (as measured by the Doppler effect) for
their visible mass to keep them together, so
he proposed dark matter was present.
A few decades later, Vera Rubin
started to notice FLAT rotation
curves in spiral galaxies.
The visible
portion of a
galaxy lies
deep in the
heart of a
large halo of
dark matter
 WAYS WE KNOW DARK MATTER IS THERE
1. Spining galaxies
2. Gravitational lensing
Dark matter could also explain certain
optical illusions that astronomers see in
the deep universe. For example,
pictures of galaxies that include strange
rings and arcs of light could be
explained if the light from even more
distant galaxies is being distorted and
magnified by massive, invisible clouds
of dark matter in the foreground-a
phenomenon known as gravitational
lensing.
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT DARK
MATTER?

• It exists.
• Has mass; that’s why it’s called ‘matter’.
• Invisible; that’s why it’s called ‘dark’ .
• Regular matter can’t seem to touch it.
• Dark matter can’t seem to touch it either.
How matter interacts

X. X X
• Unlike normal matter, dark matter does not interact with
the electromagnetic force. This means it does not absorb,
reflect or emit light, making it extremely hard to spot. In
fact, researchers have been able to infer the existence of
How dark matter interacts dark matter only from the gravitational effect it seems to
have on visible matter.
• Can’t interact with: Us / Detectors /
 • Dark matter is made of new
HOW CAN WE STUDY DARK MATTER?kind of particules that uses
new kind of force to interact
very weakly with normal
matter.
• Scientists use LHC to hunt
dark matter siblings

• Our world of normal matter has lots of different particles, so perhaps there’s whole dark world of
particles as well.
• All the particles scientists know about currently belong to the so-called Standard Model. However,
dark matter is not part of the Standard Model, and not just because it’s new. The LHC’s job is to slam
particles together at high energies, creating an environment reminiscent of the powerful first few
minutes after the Big Bang, when the universe was a roiling mass of particles, many of which live for
just the smallest fraction of a second.
WHY THIS MATTER?

• Dark matter is a big clue for all the discoveries.

• We still don’t know the nature of the universe.
• There is a large amout of stuff out there silently pulling on us, and we don’t know what it is.
• Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE.

• Astronomers thought the universe had been as it is for eternity.

BUT when they measured our surrounding stars and galaxies, they
concluded that everything was moving apart from everything else.
 WHAT COULD CAUSE THE UNIVERSE TO END?

• GRAVITY. Every bit of matter in the universe feels gravity, which is doing its best to pull the universe
back together.

1. So much stuff, gravity will win, slow down the expansion, shrink everything down; Big crunch.
2. Not enough stuff, universe keeps expanding forever, spreads out infinitely; Cold universe.
3. So much stuff, not enough to stop the expansion with gravity; expansion slowly approaches zero.

• None of these.
• Incredibly powerful
and mysterious force is
expanding the space
itself. And the universe
is growing faster.
WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?

• 68% of the universe.

• We know almost nothing about it.
• It is causing the universe to expand.
• We can’t see it; ‘dark’
HOW DO WE KNOW HOW MUCH DARK
MATTER AND DARK ENERGY THERE US IN
THE UNIVERSE?
• We can’t measure them directly.
• The most precise way was by measuring a baby picture of the universe.
• This picture is called ‘The cosmic microwave background’.

In the baby universe picture the number of wrinkles and the

patterns that form the picture are very sensitive to the
proportion of dark matter and dark energy and regular
matter.

• The universe:
- 5% stuff we know
- 27% Dark matter
- 68% Dark energy.
WE CAN ALSO MEASURE DARK ENERGY BY:
1. Looking at the rate of expansion of the universe (which we know
from supernovae)
2. Using a computer stimulation, backtrack from this present state to
just after the big bang to see how much dark energy and dark
matter we need to get things to look the way they look now.
3. Anddddd if you try to measure and explain all the energy in the
universe using only the terms of dark matter and matter, the
galaxies don’t come out correctly.
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT
THEY ARE BUT WE KNOW
THEY ARE THERE.
And we know
how much of
them there is
 WHAT THIS MEANS ABOUT THE FUTURE?
• The universe is expanding more and more quickly because of dark energy.
• As the expansion picks up speed, things that far apart will be expanding away from one another.
• The light from stars will stop being able to reach us.
• Already there are fewer stars visible in our bight sky today than there were yesterday.
• In billions of years the night sky will have only a few visible stars.
• Further into the future the bight sky could be almost totally dark.
• If the expansion continues it will rip apart our solar system, our planets.
• We know little about it, so it might slow down in the future.

Were there once more stars visible to us than there are today?
WHAT ONCE OBVIOUS FACTS ARE WE
MISSING NOW BECAUSE HUMANS ARRIVED
NEARLY 14 BILLION YEARS AFTER THE
PARTY STARTED?