5/22/2023 0 Comments Dark matter blakeThroughout the 1980s and 1990s, the existence of dark matter, sometimes characterized as cold and slow-moving, was gradually accepted by many scientists as other pieces of evidence began to build up.īut the story of dark matter is far from over. Astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, working on this problem, suggested this might be accounted for by dark matter. For instance, stars in the outer regions of spiral galaxies moved faster than they should, which suggested these galaxies had far more mass than scientists had accounted for. The term dark matter was in use by scientists as an English term by 1922.Īs astronomy and astrophysics progressed throughout the 20th century, inconsistencies about the way the universe was assumed to work began to add up. In 1904, in an effort to address the problem, Lord Kelvin found that the estimated mass of the Milky Way Galaxy was less than its observable mass, and attributed the difference to stars that were so-called “dark bodies.” Answering Kelvin in 1906, French physicist Henri Poincaré argued there wasn’t any special “matière obscure,” translated as (and the first known use of) dark matter, but rather undetected, non-light- emitting stars. In the late 19th century, astronomers noticed dark regions in otherwise dense clusters of stars. As NASA explains on its website, the dark in dark matter comes from the fact that “it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see.”
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