• Question: what is bark matter

    Asked by anon-193324 to Emma, Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Carl on 8 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-193405.
    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Oooh interesting question! It’s been a while since I studied physics so I had to look this one up.

      Apparently, we are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is.
      First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see.
      Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons.
      Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter.
      Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see.

      You can read more from NASA about this here: https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Scientists think that dark matter makes up about 80% of the mass of the universe. Dark matter is materials that does not emit light or energy. I found this page super useful: https://www.space.com/20930-dark-matter.html

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