A new ground shattering discovery could have been made last week if the report from the European space observatory can be confirmed; Dark Matter is real, maybe. Let’s start from the beginning, Dark Matter and Dark Energy isn’t some awesome sci-fi named weapon but rather the names given to the missing matter and energy that we can’t see in our universe. Confused? Well to put it simply everything we can see, the stars, nebular, planets, asteroids, comets and galaxies only make up an estimated 2% of the total mass of the universes and the other 98% we can’t see or account for, so scientists, for lack of a better name chose, dark matter and dark energy as a concept for the missing mass.
It is theorized to be a giant web that binds our universe together, stretching throughout space and is believed to be the “structure” of everything, but so far no one has detected it. The recent discover is still seen as tentative and will most likely take many years for the rest of the science community to corroborate the find but if it is confirmed then this is Nobel Prize winning research that would help us understand the universe.
Researchers at Leicester University based their dark matter theory on a signal that they have identified using measurements taken by the XMM-Newton observatory, which belongs to the European Space Agency. They realized that, throughout 15 years of measurements, the intensity of x-rays recorded rose by around 10 percent whenever observing the boundary of Earth’s magnetic field that faces the sun.
Andy Read, an astronomer on the research team, says that “any conventional thought fails to explain the phenomenon, once galaxies, stars, and other bright sources have been filtered out, the intensity of x-rays taken in space should remain the same, whenever measurements are taken.”
These new findings could bring the scientific community a lot closer to understanding what dark matter actually is, and its impact on the universe. “If the model is right then it could well be axions that we are seeing and they could explain a component of the dark matter that everyone thinks exists,” Read said. “The variation in background x-rays is solid and really interesting. What could it be down to? Well, we tried all the traditional explanations, but none of those worked, so we went to these more exotic ideas.”
We hope that Dark matter can be confirmed as it would go a long way to explaining the origins of the universe and we also hope that the international community bands together to give it a better name too.
Stay Curious – C.Costigan
