Dark Matter is Still Very Dark and Very Mysterious
A research report in Nature announced the results of the latest experiment designed to prove the existence of Dark matter. In short: “Dark Matter Remains Elusive” (Xiangdong, 542:172. February 9, 2017). Dark matter is a hypothetical matter type that cannot be observed with any existing telescope system but, it is claimed, accounts for about 27% of the matter in the universe. Thus, it is not like any known form of baryonic matter, yet was proposed to have strong gravitational effects on the motion of stars and galaxies as does all baryonic matter.
Dark matter is called dark because it neither emits, nor absorbs, electromagnetic radiation at any detectable level. For this reason, it has never been directly detected, making it one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics. In spite of spending many millions of dollars searching for it, the “nature of this material has remained a deep mystery” (Freese, 2014, The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 6). Both the existence and properties of dark matter are inferred from its claimed gravitational and its other effects on visible matter.
10,000 times more sensitive … still detected no evidence
Dark matter was first postulated by astronomer Jan Oort in 1932 to help account for the orbital velocities of the stars in the Milky Way. In 1933 Fritz Zwicky measured the orbital velocities of several galaxies in the Coma cluster, which contains over 1,000 galaxies. He found that many of these galaxies were moving so rapidly that they should have long ago escaped the gravitational attraction of the other galaxies in the Coma cluster (Ransom, 2015. Popular Science: 100 mysteries Explained. New York: Time Inc. p. 33).
The Nature article noted that WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are the leading candidate for dark matter. WIMPS are hypothetical massive subatomic particles that only weakly interact with ordinary baryonic matter. The 2017 Nature article reported on the results of the efforts to detect the WIMPs which began in the mid-1980s. The Nature article informs us that the latest Xenon instruments are about 10,000 times more sensitive than the 1980 model, but still detected no evidence of the illusive mysterious WIMP particles.
This is only one mystery that science has uncovered, and it seems the more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how much we don’t know. Science, instead of filling in the so-called gaps for God, has created more gaps for Him to fill.