Horizon: Most of our Universe is missing
We know what 4% of the Universe is made of. But what about the rest?
There was a time, not so long ago, when science seemed to understand how the universe worked. Everything – us, the Earth, the stars and even exotic-sounding supernovae – was made of atoms which were all created at time-zero: the Big Bang. In between the atoms was nothing, a void: quite literally, ‘space’.
But recently things have started to unravel. There is, it seems, a lot more to the universe than meets the eye. According to the best estimates, we only really know what about 4% of it is made of. But if only 4% is made of atoms, what about the rest? The rest is made of mysterious entities about which very little is understood, with equally mysterious names: dark matter and dark energy.
But what is dark matter?
Two men at Princeton University – Professors Peebles and Ostriker – looked further into dark matter. They even suggested that there was at least 10 times more of it than there was ordinary matter. But despite its growing acceptance, dark matter’s real identity remained completely unknown. Nothing that particle physics came up with appeared to fit the bill. Even the newly-discovered neutrino had the wrong characteristics.
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