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Dark Matter Observed |
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August 22, 2006
“Dark matter, the elusive stuff that makes up a quarter of the universe, has been seen in isolation for the first time. Marusa Bradac of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), located at the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and her colleagues made the landmark observations by studying a galaxy cluster 3 billion light years away.”
The complete text can be found here.
RuyLopez, Science Advisor to Team CastleCops, provides some background.
One may well ask, “What is Dark Matter, and why is it of any significance?” The composition of Dark Matter is unknown. Phenomenologically, it can be defined as matter that interacts exceedingly weakly with electromagnetic radiation yet manifests normal gravitational interactions. Thus while it is undetectable by direct astronomical observations, its existence is inferred from gravitational effects on conventional, visible matter.
Much indirect evidence suggests that Dark Matter, and its even more exotic partner Dark Energy may constitute as much as 95% of the total composition of the Universe! The recent observations reported above are therefore truly profound.
Forthcoming experimental investigations to be carried out at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will attempt to probe the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. You can actually contribute to these investigations through LHC@Home (link), which is part of the Team CastleCops portfolio of distributed computing research projects.
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