this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Let's pretend that you have a basket with 100 apples. You know apples are about 100g each, because you weighed 10 of the them and all of the apples seem about the same size. You know that basket weighs 1000g. You put the whole thing on a scale and find it weighs 500,000g. You know something else is in that basket. You aren't sure what, and frankly it doesn't make sense, but trying different scales and remeasuring more individual apples gives the same result. So you decide that there must be something you can't see but must exist. That's dark matter/energy.
Why isn't it called "cold matter"?
Don't we just not see it because it's not burning?
Couldn't the unseen mass be clouds, planets and black wholes?
As far as we're aware, dark matter only interacts with the universe gravitationally. It doesn't even interact with itself, which is why we don't see dark planets/stars/galaxies popping into existence. It only follows normal matter around.
As for why it's not called cold, is for two reasons:
If it happened to be clouds of gas and dust that overall had a net gravitational effect on the background galaxies, we'd be able to detect the spectral lines of these clouds. Same for just about all the other objects in that list. In some cases we do detect intergalactic gas clouds. But in places where there's very clearly unaccounted for gravitational lensing, there isn't any sign of this. So far the only things we can match up to the observations is a mathematical model of the stuff.
That makes sense. Thanks