Essay On Dark Matter

Dark matter leaves astronomers and physicists baffled as to what it possibly could be. Scientists design experiments to attempt to figure out what it is, but no one truly knows what composes dark matter. Physicists are so interested in understanding dark matter because it accounts for the formation of the Universe, as observable through studying the distribution of gravity within galaxies (Carnegie). Original attempts at studying dark matter referred to dark matter as baryonic, which is a word used to describe baryons, or quark based particles. Quarks make up “normal” subatomic particles, and so when referring to dark matter as baryonic, physicists were assuming that dark matter was made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, just like all types of known matter, yet that would infer that we would be able to observe dark matter through telescopes. In the 1970s, astrophysicists and astronomers thought browns dwarves could be composed of dark matter (Arguelles et …show more content…
Well, a large part of why dark matter is seen as an extension of gravity is how it is studied by scientists today. Dark matter was first “observed” by Fritz Zwicky of Caltech in the year 1933. Zwicky observed galaxy clusters and used mathematical calculations to attempt to determine the mass of each galaxy by observing its velocity of orbit. An issue arose when Zwicky ended up calculating the presence of more mass than could be accounted for, but these results were pushed to the side after publication due to a lack of understanding of galaxy clusters at the time. About forty years later, Vera Rubin, along with her coworkers, observed that galaxies move faster than expected when visually observing them through telescopes (Discovery). Why this is a problem for the amount of matter within the galaxy might not be so obvious, but it can easily be explained by the equation for gravity between two