The Dark Side

Astrophysicists recently have been mapping the presence of “dark matter” in the universe. Dark matter had been postulated to exist because all the gravitational effects demonstrated in the universe cannot be explained by all the observable matter. Thus, it was concluded that there is matter, composed perhaps of exotic fundamental particles, that is invisibly affecting things. Scientists speculate that dark matter might comprise 2/3rds of the entire universe’s mass. This mapping of this dark matter has been recently accomplished by measuring, with the Hubble telescope, the gravitational deflection that dark matter is causing the light from distant galaxies (ala Einstein’s theory that gravity can bend light). This is called a “gravitational lens” and the amount of dark matter (with its gravity) is measured by the size of these deflections. The more dark matter in a particular section of the sky, the more bending has been observed to occur. Also this dark matter apparently can also be located three-dimensionally by how the various light wave lengths are affected – the redder the deflected light, the further away the dark matter is (ala the “red shift”). The interesting new result of this exhaustive work is that dark matter seems to be mainly co-located with visible matter.

Also “dark energy” has be scientifically surmised because, given all the universe’s matter and dark matter, its expansion should be slowing down. In fact, the edge of the universe is speeding up. Therefore, scientists feel there must be some unknown energy source that is pushing against all this gravity to cause this unexplained universe’s expansion acceleration. They are currently devising experiments to try to measure this dark energy and it location.

Now gravity is a force … and force is defined by “mass x acceleration”. Obviously gravity has more to it than just being a force and saying that gravity as we know it (canonic gravity) exists for dark matter (whose mass is undefined) is somewhat suspect. I would like to speculate there might be something called “virtual gravity”. That would be a form of gravity that exists without any discernable mass. This could exist if, during the Big Bang, gravity was created (gravitons?) along with other fundamental particles (matter), energy, etc. Quickly thereafter virtual gravity attached itself to matter (mass) and became canonic gravity … but there was still a surfeit of virtual gravity after the entire universe’s mass had been so sated. And since it seems relatively rare to create new matter out of energy, there still should exist a large excess of virtual gravity in the universe. (I have speculated in the past about how any new matter, when created, acquires gravity.) This extra virtual gravity could, in fact, be what we know as dark matter.

A more interesting speculation is that, since virtual gravity has no discernable mass, astrophysicists’ calculations requiring the existence of “dark energy” may well be greatly overstated. In fact, if one removes “mass” from the equation for virtual gravity’s force, one is left with only “acceleration” … which is exactly what the edge of the universe is supposedly doing.