Computer simulations carried out by astronomers from the University of Groningen in collaboration with researchers from Germany, France and Sweden show that most of the (dark) matter beyond the Local Group of galaxies (which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy) must be organized in an extended plane. Above and below this plane are large voids. The observed motions of nearby galaxies and the joint masses of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy can only be properly explained with this "flat" mass distribution. The research, led by Ph.D. graduate Ewoud Wempe and Professor Amina Helmi, is published in Nature Astronomy.
The fact that 95% of the universe’s mass-energy content is fucking invisible kinda freaks me out.
Don’t worry, it might not be what we think and it could just be evidence of higher planes of reality or something deeply more complicated about time itself that we can’t understand.
Doesn’t that make you feel better??
It’s a stand-in for the lack of a better understanding currently. No one has detected dark matter in our solar system yet. It’s all just deviations from how huge amounts of matter should behave according to our formulas. Yes, Dark Matter is well established; because it’s convenient. But assuming some invisible existence to explain a lack of understanding is not science, that’s a religion.
I like to imagine there’s a group of dark matter physicists out there trying to explain why their models of the universe are 5% off, and coming up with the notion of photons and the theory of photo-energetic matter. We’re the oddballs in this neighborhood.
It’s a freaky thing to consider if you believe in some divine nature like the soul, or if you believe that you’re a conscious agent independent of your environment. With these beliefs, you position yourself as an “observer” of the universe… such a position costs you observability of the contextual processes which led to your being.
What if, instead, you’re a giant mount of cells that evolved to interact with your environment? What if your self is more of a relationship with nature than it is a static identity? From this angle, we should expect that we’re fighting an uphill battle when we want to learn about the nature of being in this universe. Most likely, we can not perceive of things which we had no necessity to perceive at any point in our ancestral lineage.
Dark matter is spooky, but only because we are beings of spookiness. We decide what is spooky and project that experience into the empirical reality of our dwelling.