That Mysterious Darkness Of Space

By James Donahue

If we stare out into space through even the most advanced telescopes known to man, we see the lights of billions of suns, planets and moons reflecting from not only the Milky Way but the many other galaxies swirling around in a vast ocean of blackness that we call space.

The many space probes we have sent out into space from Earth have traveled quite freely through what appears to be a vast black void that separates our planet from the moon, and from the sun and all of the other planets in our solar system. We have assumed that the blackness is just that, a vast pool of negative nothingness that makes up most of the universe as we now it.

But the new astronomers and researchers in astrophysics and string theorists are beginning to think that this blackness of space is much more than it appears to be. They are now proposing the existence of not only something called “dark matter,” but also “anti-matter.”

The theories are based upon the following lines of thought: There are four known forces in the universe. They are gravity, electromagnetism and two forms of nuclear force. These are the things that cause motion of the stars, planets and galaxies.

But with new advanced equipment now available, astronomers have been perplexed about another puzzle. The matter and energy that can be seen and measured appears to be moving too fast to be driven by its own gravitational force. Thus, based only on the motions of the galaxies, astronomers are forced to consider another unseen energy they are calling dark matter.

They theorize that dark matter is a form of mass that exists but does not emit light so it cannot be detected. Thus there also must be dark energy that is capable of doing work that also is invisible.

Dark matter and dark energy are not the same.

An article by Adam Frank, titled “Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Shadow Universe,” appearing in the March edition of Science, notes that data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe indicates that “most of the universe is made up of dark energy, supplemented with some dark matter and a dollop of atoms.”

In other words, Frank is saying that the “dark universe,” or the sum of dark matter and dark energy, “is pretty much THE universe.” It makes up about 95 percent of the whole thing. Thus all of the suns, planets, galaxies and other objects floating around in that vast ocean of blackness is pretty insignificant when compared to the part we cannot see or understand.

If your brains aren’t befuddled by this information, consider the new discoveries at the giant CERN laboratory that recently began smashing particles of atoms at nearly the speed of light in Switzerland. Researchers there revealed in an article just published in Nature Magazine that they have created and recorded an “anti-hydrogen” atom. This is the first proof that anti-matter may also exist in our universe.

Anti-matter theorists believe that all things in the universe are balanced by both positive and negative particles. Thus there may exist a mirror substance to everything of structure that we can see, feel and touch. We may even have a negative version of ourselves operating in a negative world.

This kind of stuff gets kind of spooky if you think about it long enough.