galaxy is embedded in a massive invisible halo of something they call dark matter. This halo would need to contain roughly six times more mass than all the visible matter combined. So when you look up at the Milky Way on a clear dark night, you're seeing less than
17th of what's actually there.
17th of what's actually there.
The rest is completely invisible, detectable only through its gravitational effects on the stars we can see.
*But here's where our story takes an even stranger turn.
--Despite decades of searching with increasingly sophisticated instruments, we have never directly detected a single particle of this dark matter. Not in laboratories deep underground, not in particle accelerators, not in space-based detectors.
It's as if we're explaining the motion of a puppet by invoking invisible strings that we can neither see nor touch, yet which must somehow be there, controlling everything. Our journey into cosmic impossibility deepens when we examine the neighborhood around our galaxy."
SleepyPhysicist