Dark Matter: The Unknown Force

a quick thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video what if I told you that your entire life everything you've ever seen everyone you've ever met every cluster of galaxies stars our planet only makes up for less than 5% of the entire universe the other 95 plus percent is made of stuff that we physically cannot observe matter an energy which we do not comprehend this has led scientists onto one profound quest of trying to improve our understanding of what all these mystical Universal ingredients might be according to Sir Isaac Newton bodies have a mutual force on each other that is determined by their masses the greater the mass the greater the force in addition a large body's force on smaller orbiting bodies greatly decreases over distance during the 1930s the Swiss American astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky investigated the movements of galaxies within a huge galaxy cluster named coma about 300 million light-years away from Earth coma consists of thousands of galaxies orbiting around the center of the cluster in all possible directions much like bees swarming around a beehive by studying the movements of a few dozen galaxies to study the gravitational field that holds the cluster together the wiki was able to conclude something that didn't make much sense the galaxy cluster rotated so rapidly that the gravity from the stars and gases and everything in the cluster could not possibly hold itself together it wasn't even close actually the value he obtained said there needed to be at least 400 times the amount of matter in the cluster just in order to keep things held together the galaxies rotated faster than their escape velocity the speed that causes a celestial body to leave its orbit for example if we could increase Earth's orbital speed by just one point five times his current speed our planet would be thrown out of our warping around the Sun and leave the solar system for good based on the insanely fast speeds Wiggy observed the cluster should dissolve quickly and leave only traces of its former existence but today the cluster is more than ten billion years old the universe itself is only 13.8 billion years old therefore the wiki concluded that there must be much more gravity in the Coma Cluster than what one could see some sort of matter that we could not see he went on and gave this missing matter in name for the first time the term dark matter was used and thus the most prolonged unresolved mystery in modern astrophysics was born however Fritz's work was unpolished the term Dark Matters wiki was using didn't talk about the same type of dark matter that we know today she knew there was something there he just didn't know what in the 1970s American astronomer Vera Rubin began studying individual stars in individual galaxies think of our solar system because they're closer to the Sun which by the way accounts for over 99% of the mass in our solar system planets like Mercury have a much shorter orbital period than planets like Saturn and Jupiter now slice this up to a galactic scale you would imagine that as you go further towards the edge of the galaxy the stars at the edge would be moving slower than the ones near the center Vera Rubin was studying this exact thing except she discovered the exact opposite within each galaxies normal matter like stars and planets that are further away from the center of the galaxy move at speeds greater than the ones near the center this doesn't make much sense as you got further and further from the galactic center the speeds at which stars moved flattened out when in fact they should have decreased if they moved too fast they'd be flung out of the galaxy and lost forever too slow and they'd literally fall out of their orbits but instead the speed stayed relatively the same but this shouldn't happen from this discovery the rabbit-hole known as dark matter gained popularity across the world dark matter is the supposed kind of material that doesn't emit reflect or interact with any kind of electromagnetic radiation things such as light x-rays gamma rays radio waves and so on the only way we've been able to figure out that dark matter might exist is through gravity gravity is the bandwidth it's the link between normal matter and dark matter this sort of introverted matter is the reason why it's nearly impossible to detect more direct evidence of the strange nature of dark matter lies in the amounts of hydrogen and helium there is in the universe the nuclear fusion in the first few minutes after the Big Bang left round numbers like 10 hydrogen nuclei for each one helium nucleus calculations showed that a most of the dark matter had participated in nuclear fusion there would be much more helium in relation to hydrogen in the universe from this we can conclude that most of the dark matter that is most of the mass in the universe does not participate in any fusion processes this disqualifies it as ordinary matter which very meaning lies in the willingness to interact with the atomic and nuclear power that builds up you and I you might be able to say that dark matter in fusion processes just don't go together according to Einstein heavy objects can alter the geometry of space-time instead of seeing gravity as a result of mass attracting mass as Newton did Einstein suggested that space and time bend around objects with mass imagine the universe as a flat grid and objects with mass create a well of sorts in this grid objects with more mass like stars and black holes create a larger well that has a larger effect on matter around it everything follows the curvature of space-time light included well it's something else that also bends light are lenses if we were to imagine a cluster of galaxies its gravitational pull literally would bend light around itself due to the sheer mass of the galaxy cluster it creates a huge gravitational well we could figure out the mass of the galaxy cluster based on how much light from the galaxy is being bent this is called gravitational lensing scientists use this trick to determine the mass of two colliding galaxy clusters called the bullet cluster about 3.5 billion light years away what clusters of galaxies collide into each other they continue to travel there isn't really even much of a crash when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in about four billion years our solar system should remain unscathed the sheer amount of literal space between stars is so massive that very few stars or planets will collide with one another however the gas in between the galaxies collides and is visibly noticeable this is what happened here the intergalactic gas inside the clusters collided with each other they heated up an emitted x-rays that we can observe however when we use the knowledge of physics as we know it using Einstein's general relativity and taking gravitational lensing into account the location of the mass wasn't where we expected it to be you would imagine that when galaxies collide the resulting galaxies from the collision would be larger and more massive and you're right to think this way however when the two galaxy clusters collided the majority of the mass was actually located on the outside of the galaxies not inside this directly aligns with our idea of how dark matter interacts with normal matter the gases in the collision were slowed down by a drag force from the gases colliding with one another this acts like something similar to air resistance here on earth however the dark matter wasn't slowed down at all remember Dark Matter only interacts with gravity normal matter can collide and fuse and heat up but Dark Matter doesn't care during the collision the dark matter in each cluster just continued on moving ahead while the gas is collided and heated up this is what you're seeing right now scientists studying this claim that the chances of this being a fluke and purely coincidence or one in one quadrillion as we know only about 5% of the matter in the universe is normal visible matter dark matter accounts for 25% about five times as much something we can't see has a bigger effect on gravity than everything else we can't see because there's so much more of it dark matter essentially lays the framework for the largest structures in the galaxy to form dark matter follows the gravitational wells that are formed by an extremely dense region of space gravity acts as a funnel in Dark Matter collects together in these dense regions of space this could be an explanation as to why we see so much of it in galaxies if dark matter is accion particles as many believe they would most likely go right through each other without crashing at all that's the very nature of accion's and that's what we observed here accion's our hypothetical particle and some scientists biggest bet when it comes to explaining what dark matter is they weigh roughly a trillionth of the mass of a neutrino the smallest particles that were aware of in our current standard model of physics if somehow accion's are the explanation for dark matter there has to be a lot of them remember if there's five times as much dark matter as there is ordinary and accion's are considered to be even smaller than the smallest things we know today then there must be an absurd amount of them in the universe you'd imagine that because there's theoretically so many of them that did be easy to detect right no not really it's similar to the signal you've received from someone calling your phone from Mars I think it's easier to explain accion's as a wave instead of a particle and here's why light itself behaves both as a particle and a wave you might have heard this before as you find particles with smaller and smaller masses you reach particles that don't have a further particle to decay into I find it much easier to picture them as waves that permeate throughout the universe a field of sorts when we detected gravitational waves in 2015 we use detectors that were 16 square kilometers in order to detect a motion that was ten thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom however when studying accion's the experiments could essentially take place in your house if you wanted the acción dark matter experiment or admx is essentially just one big magnet if there are accion's around this massive magnet literally converts these dark matter axons into microwave photons light which we can luckily see admx is one of the only detectors in the world capable of detecting accion's a similar experiment took place in 2016 students at MIT created another experiment to try and detect accion's it went under the name a broadband / president approached a cosmic accion detection with an amplifying B field ring apparatus or abracadabra funny however so far we haven't had any luck with either of these experiments nevertheless we do not know what Dark Matter really is some believe that Dark Matter does not consist of any matter at all not normal not dark not anything else but of something completely different something that has mass but doesn't behave like anything we know perhaps one day we find out the dark matter does under diffusion processes a dark fusion of sorts if we could harness that energy who knows what things we could use it for reaching to the realm of science fiction just maybe we can see the effects of forces from other dimensions other universes perhaps the usual gravity from ordinary matter crosses a thin film from a phantom universe adjacent to our own and maybe that could be the explanation for dark matter if so if we can feel forces from external universes our entire universe can only be one of an infinite set that together formed the multiverse but let's not get too crazy after the Big Bang the universe at that time was full of an atomic soup it was hot in dense but rapidly expanding dark matter in dark energy have been in a battle against each other since the Big Bang today as we know dark energy is currently the dominating force in the universe but in the early ages when the universe was much younger hotter and denser dark matter was actually the stronger of the two believe it or not we owe our entire existence to dark matter if you took the universe as we know it and kept everything except to remove the dark matter we wouldn't be here today galaxies wouldn't have been able to form in the way they did without the assistance of dark matter normal matter wouldn't have come together the way they did to form the Milky Way we know today dark matter has allowed countless galaxies to form with billions of stars and planets they're all structured in relatively the same way more or less thanks to dark matter at least one planet was able to exist in the right conditions for evolution that take place for us to be here today discovering what dark matter truly is it's just as important as Einstein's theories of relativity it's just as important as discovering the expansion of the universe it's a monumental step to the next levels of mankind the quest for dark matter is a journey as is everything else important in life sure the end goal is great but the discoveries and experiences you make along the way are what makes the entire process worth it for example because of the space race in the late 1900s we have things such as laptops gps camera phones and plenty of other things that we take for granted each day we have all of these things because of the nature of humanity we're competitive and territorial creatures by default but because of this we're pressured in our own ways to better not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us well as time goes on with every discovery we make we realized that we're recovering more and more insignificant in the grand scheme of things however these discoveries are the only way for us to push mankind further than any other species has it's like a two steps forward one step back relationship something that thousands of physicists across the world have been searching for for years is in the same room as you are right now the things that appear to be the most common things in the universe are actually some of the rarest so whenever you look up at the sky and wonder what lies beyond our reach just remember you can't see everything [Music] so quick thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video Squarespace is the ultimate solution for anyone looking to build a professional website anyone from anywhere can create a visually stunning website in minutes you don't need to be a web developer with years of experience through the use of a multitude of design templates alongside 24/7 customer support you could bring every creation you've ever imagined to life whether you're trying to start a new science blog or begin scaling your business into the Stars Squarespace you can help you every step of the way if this piques your interest head over to squarespace.com slash aperture for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase if you want to look your absolute 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Channel: Aperture

Views: 204,379

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Keywords: aperture, Dark Matter: The Unknown Force, dark matter, what is dark matter, dark matter the unknown force, what is dark matter made of, is dark matter real, dark, matter, what is dark energy, dark energy, have we found dark matter, the dark side of the universe, when will we find dark matter, science news, fermilab, nasa, searching for dark matter, axions, fritz zwicky, vera rubin, ADMX, nasa dark matter, wormholes, what are axions

Id: RyWcUhNmKFA

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019