This might come as a surprise, but we don’t really know exactly what makes up our entire universe. Don’t freak out though.
An Oxford scientist has proposed a new theory that may have put to bed one of the cosmos’ greatest mysteries.
Scientists long believed that the universe was expanding but would eventually slow down. When the Hubble telescope came along and started looking out into space, it found something weird. The universe was not slowing down — it was expanding at an accelerating rate. It didn’t make sense and astrophysicists could not explain it.
They toiled with a few competing theories but have largely settled on this: 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, two phenomena we cannot see but which scientists infer exist because of their effects on the things we can see.
Dark matter and dark energy have been considered separate phenomena, but Jamie Farnes, an astrophysicist at Oxford University, believes that both dark matter and dark energy might exist together as a “dark fluid of negative masses”. The fluid would then possess a negative gravity — instead of pulling objects toward them, they would push them away. It’s an unusual concept, but it’s not a new one.
Farnes’ theory, published in scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, comes to explain a few of the bizarre properties of the universe. For one, galaxies spin so fast that they should rip themselves apart — but it seems a “dark matter halo” prevents such destruction. The new theory suggests the negative mass “dark fluid” may cause these halos to form.
The negative matter presents a problem though, because it suggests that dark energy would become less dense over time — and observations suggest that this is not the case, dark energy stays relatively constant. Thus, Farnes’ utilizes the theory of “matter creation”, the idea that more and more of the stuff constantly bursts into existence and replenishes the negative matter that disappears.
His paper uses a great illustrative concept for the model: Space time is empty but “behaves almost like popcorn — with more negative masses continuously popping into existence.”
Delicious.
The “dark fluid” theory is just that, a theory — based on computer simulation and math. Farnes himself cautions it could be wrong and scientists are right to be suspicious. Future work is already underway to examine the existence of negative masses similar to those proposed by Farnes. Another project, the Square Kilometre Array, which will be the world’s largest radio telescope when built, could also help Farnes’ theory get off the ground, so to speak.
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