One of the most surprising discoveries about the Universe is dark matter. We still don’t know exactly what it is as we can’t see it, touch it, or shine a light on it, but we know it must exist because of how it affects the things around it. The fact that scientists were able to detect the presence of something completely invisible, just by observing its gravitational effects, is one of the most impressive achievements in human understanding of the cosmos.
The first hypothesis that something else needed to exist happen in 1933 when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed galaxy clusters and noticed something bizarre. He measured how fast the galaxies were moving and found they were moving so fast they should’ve flown apart, unless there was much more mass holding them together than we could see. He called this mysterious force "dunkle materie," or dark matter.
For decades, however, his groundbreaking observation remained largely ignored by the scientific community , until the 1970s, when American astronomer Vera Rubin reignited interest in dark matter. Rubin and her team studied how stars orbit around the centers of spiral galaxies. According to Newtonian physics, stars farther from the center should orbit more slowly (just like planets farther from the Sun), but they found the speeds stayed flat: stars far from the center were orbiting just as fast as those near the middle.
Her findings reignited curiosity, turning dark matter from an odd hypothesis into mainstream astrophysics. Scientists soon realized that dark matter doesn't just exist,it's everywhere, outnumbering visible matter nearly five to one. Today, dark matter continues to fascinate scientists, shaping research at the cutting edge of physics and cosmology. Advanced detectors deep underground, particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, and even telescopes scouring the cosmos all strive to unveil this elusive substance.
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