What is "Dark Matter"? Can someone please give me a detailed explanation!

Question

Reading info from websites is confusing me, could someone give me a good explanation?

And is it visible or not >_<

Answer 1

It&#039;s very little understood, because it had not been known about.

It is basically &quot;anti-matter&quot;.  In the same respect that positives and negatives contradict each other, so do dark matter and matter.  When dark matter and matter come into contact, explosions and many extreme events occur.

Some scientists believe that the existence of dark matter is what causes matter to have gravity.

Answer 2

Dark matter is matter that doesn&#039;t interact with the electromagnetic force, but does have gravity.

No, it isn&#039;t visible.

Answer 3

The spin rate of an edge on galaxy can be determined by Doppler shift. One can estimate the amount of mass by looking at the total brightness, and looking for the gas and dust. And you can find the distance to the galaxy by looking at certain variable stars, etc. You can see the apparent size of the galaxy, and with the distance, you can figure out how big it is. When you combine all this, you find that there isn&#039;t nearly enough mass to make the galaxy spin at the rate you measured. There must be more mass. This is called Dark Matter. It&#039;s primarily called &quot;Dark&quot; because we have no idea what it is. It&#039;s not just that it does not emit any kind of light.

But we now know a considerable amount about what it isn&#039;t. It&#039;s not free floating cold planets or other objects that are just too dim, at least not much of it. It&#039;s not black holes or neutron stars. It&#039;s not neutrinos - they don&#039;t have enough mass or the right behavior. That leaves an undiscovered particle that does not interact with other stuff much, if at all, except by gravity, and it has some odd properties of it&#039;s own where it doesn&#039;t just gravitationally collapse into tiny clumps.

So, how does one detect dark matter? Well, it has gravity, and gravity can bend light. So very large clumps of it can be detected statistically by looking for changes to the light from background sources - mostly galaxies. It&#039;s very hard, but has been done.

Answer 4

Dark matter is a name given to the unknown particle or substance that explains the unexplained mass of the universe.

According to astronomers, the total mass in the universe is too small to explain all the gravity in the universe.  And so there must be another substance to explain the unknown sources of gravity, named dark matter.

Answer 5

  Dark matter is theoretical matter,it was invented to permeate the space in a galaxy to explain why the outer arms in a galaxy rotate locked in step with the galactic center without the outer arms flying away.

  If galaxies obey Neutons laws it is necessary.

Answer 6

The universe is unbalanced.  The planets, stars and orbits simply shouldn&#039;t be as they are.  To balance the differences and equal things out, the people in white overalls suggested the existence of Dark Matter.  Dark matter is used, though not in the least understood, to explain the imbalances.

Personally I think that the possibility of the planets and moons being hollow could go a long way to explain, sensibly, that for which dark matter has simply been invented.  There is evidence suggesting that what I say is at least possible.

Answer 7

it is a theory of what space is made of - a mass of nothing-ness similar to &quot;ether&quot;

Answer 8

simple answer is that we don&#039;t know. It seems to contradict many of our understandings about the way the universe works.

We all know that light waves, also called radiation, carry energy. You feel that energy the moment you step outside on a hot summer day.

Einstein&#039;s famous equation, E = mc2, teaches us that matter and energy are interchangeable, merely different forms of the same thing. We have a giant example of that in our sky: the Sun. The Sun is powered by the conversion of mass to energy.