This week astronomers announced that they have found solid evidence of “dark matter”, an elusive substance that may account for up to 25% of Everything in the Universe. Which is a lot more than all the Toyotas ever produced laid end-to-end, every piece of luggage ever lost by an airline, every Beatles CD ever burned (including all the illegal stuff), and every sock ever lost in the laundry put together.

Q. You might be asking, “What is “dark matter”, and can I buy some on eBay or Amazon.com?”

A. Not yet.

One difficulty in selling dark matter is that no one knows what it actually is (though this did not stop the Segway  or “Snakes on a Plane” marketing teams). Some speculate that it could partially be composed of non-luminous space junk, gas, dust, rock, and not-quite-stars called brown dwarfs (or is it dwarves?). Others think that dark matter is composed of exotic matter that only marginally interacts with regular baryonic matter (i.e. pretty much everything we can see or touch; composed of atoms), sort of like congressmen or supermodels.

The only way you’ll be able to get it at this point in time is through the black market or if you know a K street lobbyist.

Q. If we can’t interact with it, how could they find the dark matter? Or that luggage you mentioned earlier?

A. Like congressmen, you may not be able to observe or interact with individual pieces of dark matter directly, but you can see the effects of a lot grouped together. Einstein predicted that an objects’ gravity could bend light, and experiments have borne that out. The more massive an object, the more light bends around it. This week’s discovery is based on a gravitiational bending of light called “gravitational lensing”; astronomers looked at a region of space suspected to have dark matter and noted that the light from faraway obects passing through the region bent far more than could be accounted for by the mass of visible matter in the area. Dark matter is the only explanation offered at this time. Feel free to offer your own, though any verbiage containing “his noodly appendage” will be discounted.

In case you were wondering, congressmen are so massive that they actually cause money to change direction; the larger the group, the more money gets tossed around.

As far as the luggage goes, our advice is to buy insurance next time.

Q. Why is this a big deal?

A. Of the various mathematical models of the Universe, the ones that come closest to describing wht we actually observe includes a large amount of dark matter to provide sufficient mass for holding galaxies together. If what we saw was all there was, the Milky Way and all the galaxies in the Observable Universe would fly apart like 4th of July pinwheels. While there had been mathematical and antecdotal evidence for dark matter (I mean, we’re here, aren’t we?), there is now some solid observational evidence. No word from astronomers as to whether they’ve spotted the lost luggage and socks out there, though.  

Cosmologists are breathing a little easier now, since they can now account for a large chunk of the Cosmic Budget.

On that note, let’s review the high-level numbers for a moment:

Observable Universe/Everything we can see - stars, planets, baryonic matter, neutrinos, etc. = 5% of Everything

Dark Matter (likely observed as of 8/21/06, not explained) = 25% of Everything

Dark Energy (hypothetical, unObserved, unexplained) = 70% of Everything

Your Place in the Universe = You Don’t Want to Know

Cosmologists, physicists, and astronomers my be sleeping better now, but I’m still staring at the ceiling at night, wondering What in the World is Going on Out There. I feel like I’m still in the dark on damn near Everything, including what the hell is going on on “Lost”.

And if anyone is ever going to find that Samsonite of mine that United lost at Miami International Airport.

I hope it is in deep intergalactic space now, because if anyone ever finds it and opens it, I’m going to have some real explaining to do.

bc

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