On Sun, 5 May 2002, ~*brianna*~ wrote:
> Hi, I am doing a report on dark matter.  I have done some research,
> and its kind of hard for me to understand.  Can you tell me all you
> know about Dark Matter, but in a simple way? Where is dark matter?

OK, so here it is in a nutshell.  The universe is full of
stuff -- it is made of atomic particles and it is shaped into
people, planets, stars and galaxies (which are stars and dust).

All of this matter, we believe, was made in a huge outburst of
energy about 13billion years ago called The Big Bang.  The energy
from this Big Bang created the atomic matter and threw it out into
space.  There it formed me and you and Cadillac cars and stars.

We used to think that that was the whole story.

But, we are realizing that there was MORE than just atomic matter
created in the Big Bang.  Another form of matter was created and
it got spewed out into the universe along with the atomic matter.
In fact, as far as we can tell, there is more of this other form of matter
than atomic matter!

This other matter, created in the Big Bang like atomic matter, is
called Dark matter.  We can't see it.  It is invisible.  But, we
can detect it by seeing its gravitational effects.  Where is it?
Well, remember when I said that a galaxy was just stars and dust?
Well, nowadays we believe that Galaxies are really big clouds
of this dark matter.  Just like water forms clouds in the sky, dark matter
formed clouds in the universe.  These clouds of dark matter, by their
gravitational pull, drew swirls of atomic matter into them.  This atomic
matter formed stars and planets.  We used to think of it as the body of
the galaxy are really just the icing on the cake.  A galaxy is really
mostly a cloud of Dark Matter which has stars stuck in it.

That's how we hope to detect it.  The Earth orbits around the sun which is
just an ordinary star in a typica galaxy and therefore
we must be moving through the Dark Matter cloud.  So, some of the dark
matter must be going through the earth and we might be able to detect
it!

Peace,
Scott Funkhouser,
Berkeley Cosmology Group




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"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"~"
name:Armel.Funkhouser/Scott
work:Berkeley.Cosmology.Group/CDMSII
http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~armel
phon:510.643/3950