66 million years ago, a ten-mile-wide object from outer space hurtled into the Earth at incredible speed and destroyed the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet.
Where did it come from, and why? And how is this connected to dark matter – the most mysterious, elusive stuff in the universe, that interacts with gravity like ordinary matter but doesn’t emit or absorb light. Astronomers know it’s there but it is invisible.
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs tells the story of Big Bang theory, cosmological inflation, the makeup of the universe and our solar system’s place in it; it’s about mass extinctions through the ages, what we know has hit the Earth and what might hit us in the future. And it explores the radical idea that dark matter might ultimately have been responsible for the dinosaurs’ extinction.
A horizon-expanding tour of the cosmos that blends what we know about the universe with new thinking, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is a book full of wonders, from a gifted scientist and writer.
Lisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honors and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of several acclaimed books on physics.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lisa Randall
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Introduction
PART I: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNIVERSE
1 The Clandestine Dark Matter Society
2 The Discovery of Dark Matter
3 The Big Questions
4 Almost the Very Beginning: A Very Good Place to Start
5 A Galaxy Is Born
PART II: AN ACTIVE SOLAR SYSTEM
6 Meteoroids, Meteors, and Meteorites
7 The Short, Glorious Lives of Comets
8 The Edge of the Solar System
9 Living Dangerously
10 Shock and Awe
11 Extinctions
12 The End of the Dinosaurs
13 Life in the Habitable Zone
14 What Goes Around Comes Around
15 Flinging Comets from the Oort Cloud
PART III: DECIPHERING DARK MATTER’S IDENTITY
16 The Matter of the Invisible World
17 How to See in the Dark
18 Socially Connected Dark Matter
19 The Speed of Dark
20 Searching for the Dark Disk
21 Dark Matter and Comet Strikes
Conclusion: Looking Up
Acknowledgments
Supplementary Reading
Index
Copyright
Warped Passages
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
Higgs Discovery
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“Dark matter” and “dinosaurs” are words you rarely hear together except perhaps in the playground, a fantasy gaming club, or some not-yet-released Spielberg movie. Dark matter is the elusive stuff in the Universe that interacts through gravity like ordinary matter, but that doesn’t emit or absorb light. Astronomers detect its gravitational influence, but they literally don’t see it. Dinosaurs, on the other hand … I doubt I need to explain dinosaurs. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates from 231 to 66 million years ago.
Though both dark matter and dinosaurs are independently fascinating, you might reasonably assume that this unseen physical substance and this popular biological icon are entirely unrelated. And this might well be the case. But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact. This book explores a speculative scenario in which my collaborators and I suggest that dark matter might ultimately (and indirectly) have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaur.
Paleontologists, geologists, and physicists have shown that 66 million years ago, an object at least ten kilometers wide plummeted to Earth from space and destroyed the terrestrial dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. The object might have been a comet from the outer reaches of the Solar System, but no one knows why this comet was perturbed from its weakly bound, but stable, orbit.
Our proposal is that during the Sun’s passage through the midplane of the Milky Way—the stripe of stars and bright dust that you can observe in a clear night sky—the Solar System encountered a disk of dark matter that dislodged the distant object, thereby precipitating this cataclysmic impact. In our galactic vicinity, the bulk of the dark matter surrounds us in an enormous smooth and diffuse spherical halo.
The type of dark matter that triggered the dinosaurs’ demise would be distributed very differently from most of the elusive dark matter in the Universe. The additional type of dark matter would leave the halo intact, but its very different interactions would make it condense into a disk—right in the middle of the Milky Way plane. This thin region could be so dense that when the Solar System passes through it, as the Sun oscillates up and down during its orbit through our galaxy, the disk’s gravitational influence would be unusually strong. Its gravitational pull could be powerful enough to dislodge comets at the outer edge of the Solar System, where the Sun’s competing pull would be too weak to rein them back in. The errant comets would then be ejected from the Solar System or—more momentously—be redirected to hurtle toward the inner Solar System, where they might have the potential to strike the Earth.
I’ll tell you right up front that I don’t yet know if this idea is correct. It’s only an unexpected type of dark matter that would yield measurable influences on living beings (well, technically no longer living). This book is the story of our unconventional proposal about just such surprisingly influential dark matter.
But these speculative ideas—as provocative as they might be—are not this book’s primary focus. At least as important to its content as the story of the dinosaur-destroying comet are the context and the science that embrace it, which include the far better established frameworks of cosmology and the science of the Solar System. I feel very fortunate that the topics I study frequently guide my research toward big questions such as what stuff is made of, the nature of space and time, and how everything in the Universe evolved to the world we see today. In this book, I hope to share a lot of this too.
In the research that I will describe, my studies led me down a path where I started thinking more broadly about cosmology, astrophysics, geology, and even biology. The focus was still on fundamental physics. But having done more conventional particle physics all my life—the study of the building blocks of familiar matter such as the paper or screen on which you’re reading this—I’ve found it refreshing to probe into what is known—and what soon will be known—about the dark world too, as well as the implications of basic physical processes for the Solar System and for the Earth.
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs explains our current knowledge about the Universe, the Milky Way, the Solar System, as well as what makes for a habitable zone and life on Earth. I’ll discuss dark matter and the cosmos, but I will also delve into comets, asteroids, and the emergence and extinction of life, with special focus on the object that fell to Earth to kill off the terrestrial dinosaurs—and a lot of the rest of life here. I wanted this book to convey the many incredible connections that got us here so we can more meaningfully understand what is happening now. When we think about our planet today, we might also want to better understand the context in which it developed.
When I started concentrating on the concepts underlying the ideas in this book, I was awe-struck and enchanted not only by our current knowledge of our environment—local, solar, galactic, and universal, but also by how much we ultimately hope to understand, from our random tiny perch here on Earth. I also was overwhelmed by the many connections among the phenomena that ultimately allow us to exist. To be clear, mine is not a religious viewpoint. I don’t feel the need to assign a purpose or meaning. Yet I can’t help but feel the emotions we tend to call religious as we come to understand the immensity of the universe, our past, and how it all fits together. It offers anyone some perspective when dealing with the foolishness of everyday life.
This newer research actually has made me look differently at the world and the many pieces of the Universe that created the Earth—and us. Growing up in Queens I saw the impressive buildings of New York City, but not so much of nature. What little nature I did see was cultivated into parks or lawns—retaining little of the form it took before humans arrived. Yet when you walk on a beach, you are walking on ground up creatures—or at least their protective coverings. The limestone cliffs you might see on a beach or in the countryside are composed of previously living creatures too, from millions of years in the past. Mountains arose from tectonic plates that collided, and the molten magma that drives these movements is the result of radioactive material buried near the core of the Earth. Our energy came from the Sun’s nuclear processes—though it has been transformed and stored in different ways since those initial nuclear reactions occurred. Many of the resources we use are heavier elements that came from outer space, which were deposited on the Earth’s surface by asteroids or comets. Some amino acids were deposited by meteoroids too—perhaps bringing life—or the seeds of life—to Earth. And before any of this happened, dark matter collapsed into clumps whose gravity attracted more matter—which eventually turned into galaxies, galaxy clusters, and stars like our Sun. Ordinary matter—important as it is to us—does not tell the whole story.
Although we might experience the illusion of a self-contained environment, every day at sunrise and every night when the Moon and the far more distant stars come into view, we are reminded that our planet is not alone. Stars and nebulae are further evidence that we exist in a galaxy that resides within a far larger Universe. We orbit within a Solar System where the seasons remind us further of our orientation and placement within it. Our very measurement of time in terms of days and years signifies the relevance of our surroundings.
• • •
Four inspiring lessons that I wanted to share stand out to me from the research and readings that led to this book. Close to my heart is the satisfaction of understanding how the pieces of the Universe connect in so many remarkable ways. The big lesson at the most fundamental level is that the physics of elementary particles, the physics of the cosmos, and the biology of life itself all connect—not in some New-Age sense, but in remarkable ways that are well worth understanding.
Stuff from outer space hits the Earth all the time. Yet the Earth has a love-hate relationship with its environment. The planet benefits from some of what’s around us, but much of it can be lethal. The position of our planet allows for the right temperature, the outer planets divert most incoming asteroids and comets before they strike the Earth, the distance between the Moon and the Earth stabilizes our orbit sufficiently to prevent massive temperature fluctuations, and the outer Solar System shields us from dangerous cosmic rays. Meteoroids hitting the Earth might have deposited resources critical to life, but they also affected the trajectory of life on the planet in more detrimental ways. At least one such object led to a devastating extinction 66 million years ago. Though it wiped out the land-dwelling dinosaurs, it also paved the way for the existence of larger mammals, including ourselves.
The second point—also impressive—is how recent are so many of the scientific developments that I will discuss. Perhaps people can make the following statement at any point in human history, but that does not diminish its validity: we have advanced our knowledge tremendously in the last [here insert a context-dependent number] years. For the research I will describe, that number is less than fifty. As I was doing my own research, and reading about others’, I was constantly struck by how new and deeply revolutionary so many recent discoveries have been. Human ingenuity and stubbornness have consistently emerged as scientists have tried to reconcile themselves to the often surprising and always entertaining and sometimes scary things we learned about the world. The science this book presents is part of a larger history—13.8 or 4.6 billion years according to whether you focus on the Universe or the Solar System. However, the history of human beings’ unraveling these ideas is little more than a century old.
The dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, but paleontologists and geologists deduced the nature of that extinction only in the 1970s and 1980s. Once the relevant ideas had been introduced, it was a matter of decades before a community of scientists more fully evaluated them. And the timing was not entirely coincidental. The extinction’s connection to an extraterrestrial object became more credible once astronauts had landed on the Moon and seen craters up close—presenting them with detailed evidence of the dynamical nature of the Solar System.
In the last fifty years, significant advances in particle physics and cosmology have taught us about the Standard Model, which describes the basic elements of matter as we understand them today. The amount of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe too was pinned down only in the last decades of the twentieth century. Our knowledge of the Solar System also changed during the same time frame. And only in the 1990s did scientists discover the Kuiper belt objects in Pluto’s vicinity, demonstrating that Pluto is not orbiting alone. The number of planets was reduced—but only because the science you might have learned in grade school is now richer and more complex.
The third major lesson centers on the rate of change. Natural selection permits adaptation when species have time to evolve. But that adaptation won’t encompass radical changes. It is far too slow. The dinosaurs weren’t in a position to prepare for a 10-kilometer-wide meteoroid hitting the Earth. They couldn’t adapt. Those stuck on land, who were too big to bury themselves, had nowhere viable to go.
As new ideas or technologies emerge, debates over catastrophic versus gradual change have also played a big role. Key to understanding most new developments—scientific or otherwise—is the pace of the processes they describe. I frequently hear people suggest that certain developments, such as studies in genetics or advances deriving from the Internet, are unprecedentedly dramatic. But this is not entirely true. The improved understanding of disease or of the circulatory system, which dates back hundreds of years, brought about changes at least as profound as genetics does today. The introduction of written language, and later of the printing press, influenced the ways people acquired knowledge and how they thought in ways at least as significant as those that the Internet precipitated.
As with these developments, a very important factor for current change is also its rapidity—a topic that can be pertinent not only to scientific processes, but to environmental and sociological changes too. Although death by meteoroid is not likely to be a significant concern for us today, the quickening rates of changes in the environment and in extinctions likely are—and the impact could be comparable in many ways. The perhaps not-so-hidden agenda of this book is to help us better understand the amazing story of how we got here and to encourage us to use that knowledge wisely.
Even so, the fourth important lesson is the remarkable science describing the often hidden elements of our world and its development—and how much about the Universe we can hope to understand. Many people are fascinated by the idea of a multiverse—other universes not within our reach. But at least as fascinating are the many hidden worlds—both biological and physical—that we do have a chance to explore and learn more about. In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, I hope to convey how inspiring it can be to contemplate what we know—as well as what we might expect or hope to figure out in the future.
• • •
This book begins by explaining cosmology—the science of how the Universe has evolved to its current state. Its first part presents the Big Bang theory, cosmological inflation, and the makeup of the Universe. This section also explains what dark matter is, how we ascertained its existence, and why it is relevant to the Universe’s structure.
Dark matter constitutes 85 percent of the matter in the Universe while ordinary matter—such as that contained in stars, gas, and people—constitutes only 15 percent. Yet people are mainly preoccupied with the existence and relevance of ordinary matter—which, to be fair, interacts far more strongly.
However, as with humanity, it doesn’t make sense to focus all our attention on the small percentage that is disproportionately influential. The dominant 15 percent of matter that we can see and feel is only part of the story. I will explain dark matter’s critical role in the Universe—both for galaxies and for galaxy clusters forming out of the amorphous cosmic plasma in the early Universe—and in maintaining the stability of these structures today.
The second part of the book zooms in on the Solar System. The Solar System alone could of course be the subject of an entire book, if not of an encyclopedia. So I will focus on the constituents that might have concerned the dinosaurs—meteoroids, asteroids, and comets. This part will describe objects that we know have hit the Earth and what we anticipate might hit it in the future, as well as the sparse but not-obviously-dismissible evidence for extinctions or meteoroid strikes that occur at regularly spaced intervals of about 30 million years. This section also discusses life’s formation, as well as its destruction—reviewing what is known about the five major mass extinctions, including the devastating event that killed the dinosaurs.
The book’s third and final part integrates the ideas from the first two, starting with a discussion of models of dark matter. It explains the more familiar models for what dark matter might be, as well as the newer suggestion for dark matter interactions hinted at above.
At this point, we know only that dark matter and ordinary matter interact via gravity. Gravity’s consequences are generally so tiny that we register the influence only of enormous masses—such as that of the Earth and the Sun—and even those are pretty feeble. After all, you can pick up a paper clip with a tiny magnet, successfully competing against the gravitational influence of the entire Earth.
However, dark matter might experience other forces too. Our new model challenges people’s assumption—and prejudice—that familiar matter is unique because of the forces—electromagnetism, the weak, and the strong nuclear forces—through which it interacts. These conventional matter forces, which are much stronger than gravity, account for many of the interesting features of our world. But what if some of the dark matter experiences influential non-gravitational interactions too? If true, dark matter forces could lead to dramatic evidence of connections between elementary matter and macroscopic phenomena even deeper than the many we already know to be present.
Although everything in the Universe could in principle interact, most such interactions are far too small to readily register. Only things that affect us in a detectable way can be observed. If you have something exerting and experiencing only tiny effects, it might be right under your nose yet escape your notice. That’s presumably why individual dark matter particles—though probably all around us—have so far escaped discovery.
The third part of the book shows how thinking more broadly about dark matter—asking why the dark universe should be so simple when ours is so complicated—led us to consider some novel possibilities. Maybe a portion of the dark matter experiences is own force—dark light if you will. If most dark matter is usually relegated to the relatively uninfluential 85 percent, we could then think of the newly proposed type of dark matter as an upwardly mobile middle class—with interactions mimicking those of familiar matter. The additional interactions would affect the makeup of the galaxy and allow this portion of dark matter to affect the motion of stars and other objects in the domain of ordinary matter.
In the next five years, satellite observations will measure the galaxy’s shape, composition, and properties in greater detail than ever before—telling us a great deal about our galactic environment and testing whether or not our conjecture is true. Such observable implications make dark matter and our model legitimate science that is worthy of exploration—even if dark matter is not a building block of you and me. The consequences might include meteoroid impacts—one of which could have been the link between dark matter and the disappearance of the dinosaurs to which the book’s title alludes.
The background and concepts that connect these phenomena offers us a capacious, 3-d picture of the Universe. My goal in writing this book is to share these ideas and to encourage you to explore, appreciate, and bolster the remarkable richness of our world.
We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting. Meteors flash across the sky on a moonless night, unfamiliar animals shadow us when we hike through the woods, magnificent architectural details surround us as we walk through a town. Yet we often overlook these remarkable sights—even when they are directly in our field of view. Our very bodies host colonies of bacteria. Ten times more bacterial cells than human cells live inside us and help with our survival. Yet we are barely aware of these microscopic creatures that live in us, consume nutrients, and aid our digestive systems. Only when bacteria misbehave and make us ill do most of us even acknowledge their existence.
To view things, you have to look. And you have to know how to look. But at least the phenomena I just mentioned can in principle be seen. Imagine the further challenges in understanding something that you literally cannot see. That would be dark matter, the elusive stuff in the Universe that has only minuscule interactions with the matter we understand. In the chapter that follows, I’ll explain the many measurements with which astronomers and physicists have established dark matter’s existence. In this one, I’ll introduce this elusive matter: what it is, why it might seem so perplexing, and why—from some important perspectives—it is not.
Although the Internet is a single giant network in which billions of people engage online, most of those who are communicating on social networks don’t interact directly—or even indirectly—with each other. Participants tend to friend like-minded people, follow others with similar interests, and turn to news sources that represent their own particular worldview. With such restricted interactions, the many people engaged online fragment into distinct, non-interacting populations within which they rarely encounter an objectionable point of view. Even people’s friends’ friends don’t generally confront the contradictory opinions of unaffiliated groups, so most of the Internet’s participants are oblivious to the existence of unfamiliar communities with different, incompatible ideas.
We’re not all so closed to worlds outside our own. But when it comes to dark matter, we’re all guilty as charged. Dark matter just isn’t part of ordinary matter’s social network. It lives in an Internet chat room that we don’t yet know how to enter. It’s in the same Universe and even occupies the same regions of space as visible matter. But dark matter particles interact only imperceptibly with the ordinary matter that we know. As with Internet communities to which we are oblivious—unless we are told about dark matter, in our daily lives we would be unaware it exists.
Like the bacteria within us, dark matter is one of many other “universes” right under our noses. And like those microscopic creatures, it is all around us too. Dark matter passes right through our bodies—and resides in the outside world as well. Yet we don’t notice any of its consequences because it interacts so feebly—so much so that it forms a distinct population. It is a society totally separate from the matter that we know.
But it’s an important one. Whereas bacterial cells—though numerous—account for only about one or two percent of our weight, dark matter—though an insignificant fraction of our bodies—accounts for about 85 percent of the matter in the Universe. Every cubic centimeter around you contains about a proton’s mass worth of matter. That might sound like a lot or a little depending on how you view it. But it means that if dark matter is composed of particles whose mass is comparable to those we know of and if those particles travel at the velocity we expect based on well-understood dynamics, billions of dark matter particles pass through each of us every second. Yet no one notices that they are there. The effect of even billions of dark matter particles on us is minuscule.
That’s because we can’t sense dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light—at least to the extent that people have been able to probe so far. Dark matter is not made out of the same material as ordinary matter—it’s not composed of atoms or the familiar elementary particles that do interact with light, which is essential to everything we can see. The mystery that my colleagues and I hope to solve is what precisely dark matter is composed of. Does it consist of a new type of particle? If so, what are its properties? Aside from its gravitational interactions, does it have any interactions at all? If we are lucky with current experiments, particles of dark matter might turn out to experience some minuscule electromagnetic interactions that have so far been too small to detect. Dedicated probes are searching—I’ll explain how in the third part of the book. But so far dark matter remains invisible. Its effects haven’t influenced detectors at their current level of sensitivity.
However, when large amounts of dark matter aggregate into concentrated regions, its net gravitational influence is substantial, leading to measurable influences on stars and on nearby galaxies. Dark matter affects the expansion of the Universe, the path of light rays passing to us from distant objects, the orbits of stars around the centers of galaxies, and many other measurable phenomena in ways that convince us of its existence. We know about dark matter—and indeed it does exist—because of these measurable gravitational effects.
Furthermore, even though it is unseen and unfelt, dark matter played a pivotal role in forming the Universe’s structure. Dark matter can be compared to the under-appreciated rank and file of society. Even when invisible to the elite decision makers, the many workers who built pyramids or highways or assembled electronics were crucial to the development of their civilizations. Like other unnoticed populations in our midst, dark matter was essential to our world.
We wouldn’t even be around to comment on any of this, let alone put together a coherent picture of the Universe’s evolution, if dark matter hadn’t been present in the early Universe. Without dark matter, there wouldn’t have been enough time to form the structure that we now observe. Clumps of dark matter seeded the Milky Way galaxy—as well as other galaxies and galaxy clusters. Had galaxies not formed, neither would have the stars, nor the Solar System, nor life as we know it. Even today, the collective action of dark matter keeps galaxies and galaxy clusters intact. Dark matter might even be relevant to the trajectory of the Solar System if the dark disk alluded to in the introduction exists.
Yet we don’t observe dark matter directly. Scientists have studied many forms of matter but all of them whose composition we know have been observed with some form of light—or more generally, electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation appears as light at visible frequencies, but can also appear as radio waves or ultraviolet radiation, for example, when outside the limited range of frequencies that we can see. The effects might be observed under a microscope, with a radar device, or in optical images on a photograph. But electromagnetic influences are always involved. Not all of the interactions are direct—charged elements interact with light most directly. But the elements of the Standard Model of particle physics—the most basic elements of the matter we know about—interact with each other enough that light, if not directly a friend, is at least a friend of a friend of all the forms of matter we can see.
Not only our vision, but our other senses—touch, smell, taste, and sound—rely on atomic interactions, which rely in turn on the interactions of electrically charged particles. Touch too, though for more subtle reasons, relies on electromagnetic vibrations and interactions. Since human senses are all based in electromagnetic interactions of some sort, we can’t directly detect dark matter in the usual ways. Although dark matter is all around us, we can’t see or feel it. When light shines on dark matter, it doesn’t do anything. The light just passes through.
Given that they’ve never seen (or felt or smelled) it, many people I’ve spoken to are surprised at the existence of dark matter and find it quite mysterious—or even wonder if it’s some sort of mistake. People ask how it can possibly be that most matter—about five times the amount of ordinary matter—cannot be detected with conventional telescopes. Personally, I would expect quite the opposite (though admittedly not everyone sees it this way). It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists. Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From this perspective, the question is really why the stuff we do know about should constitute as much of the energy density of the Universe as it does.
Dark matter might sound like an exotic suggestion to some, but proposing its existence is far less rash than revising the laws of gravity—as dark matter skeptics might prefer. Dark matter—although indeed unfamiliar—is likely to have a more or less conventional explanation that is completely consistent with all known physical laws. After all, why should all matter that acts in accordance with known laws of gravity behave exactly like familiar matter? To put it succinctly, why should all matter interact with light? Dark matter can simply be matter that has different or no fundamental charges. Without electric charge or interactions with charged particles, dark matter simply can’t absorb or emit light.
However, I do have a slight problem with one aspect of dark matter, which is its name. I don’t take issue with the “matter” part. Dark matter is indeed a form of matter—meaning that it is stuff that clumps and exerts its own gravitational influence, interacting with gravity like all other matter. Physicists and astronomers detect its presence in diverse ways that rely on this interaction.
It is the “dark” in the name that is unfortunate—both because we see dark things, which absorb light, and because the ominous-sounding label makes it sound more potent and negative than it actually is. Dark matter is not dark—it is transparent. Dark stuff absorbs light. Transparent things, on the other hand, are oblivious to it. Light can hit dark matter, but neither the matter nor the light will change as a result.
At a recent conference bringing together people from many disciplines, I met Massimo, a marketing professional who specializes in branding. When I told him about my research, he looked at me incredulously and asked, “Why is this called dark matter?” His objection was not to the science, but to the name’s needlessly negative connotations. It’s not exclusively true that every brand associates negative qualities with “dark.” The “Dark Knight” was a good guy—if complicated. But compared to its use in Dark Shadows, His Dark Materials, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Darth Vader’s “dark side of the Force”—not to mention the hilarious dark song from the Lego movie—the “dark” in “dark matter” is pretty tame. Despite our evident fascination with things dark, dark matter doesn’t really live up to the name’s reputation.
Dark matter does, however, share one quality with the evil stuff: it is hidden from view. Dark matter is aptly named in the sense that no matter how much you heat it up, it won’t emit light. In that sense it is truly dark—not in the sense of being opaque but in the sense of being the opposite of light-emitting or even light-reflecting. No one sees dark matter directly—even with a microscope or a telescope. As with the many malevolent spirits in movies and literature, its invisibility serves as its shield.
Massimo agreed that “transparent matter” would have been a better name—or at least less scary. Although true from a physics perspective, I’m not certain that he’s right. “Dark matter,” even if not my favorite term, seems to attract a fair amount of attention. Nonetheless, dark matter is neither ominous nor powerful—at least without a huge amount of it. It interacts so feebly with normal matter that it’s extremely challenging to find. That’s part of what makes it so interesting.
The name “dark matter” gives rise to other confusions too—even beyond the ominous-sounding implications referred to above. For example, a lot of the people I talk to about my research fail to distinguish dark matter from black holes. To clarify the distinction, I’ll take a brief detour to discuss black holes, which are objects that form when too much matter gets within too small a region of space. Nothing—including light—escapes from their powerful gravitational influence.
Black holes and dark matter are no more the same than black ink and film noir. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light. Black holes absorb light—and anything else that comes too close. Black holes are black because all light that goes in remains in. It is not radiated and it is not reflected back. Dark matter might have been relevant to the formation of black holesfn1 since any form of matter can collapse to form one. But black holes and dark matter are certainly not the same thing. They should in no way be confused.
One further misunderstanding is triggered by dark matter’s infelicitous name. Because another component of the Universe is named “dark energy”—also a problematic choice—people often confuse it too with dark matter. Although also a diversion from our main topic, dark energy is an essential part of cosmology today. So I’ll now clarify this other term to ensure that you—my enlightened reader—will always know the difference.
Dark energy is not matter—it is just energy. Dark energy exists even if no actual particle or other form of stuff is around. It permeates the Universe, but doesn’t clump like ordinary matter. The density of dark energy is the same everywhere—it can be no denser in one region than another. It is very different from dark matter, which collects into objects and will be denser in some places than in others. Dark matter acts like familiar matter, which gets bound into objects such as stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. The dark energy distribu tion, on the other hand, is always smooth.
Dark energy also remains constant over time. Unlike matter or radiation, dark energy does not become more dilute when the Universe expands. This is in some respects its defining property. The dark energy density—energy not carried by particles or matter—remains the same over time. For this reason, physicists often refer to this type of energy as a cosmological constant.
Early in the Universe’s evolution, most of the energy was carried by radiation. But radiation dilutes more quickly than matter so matter took over eventually as the largest energy contribution. Much later in the Universe’s evolution, dark energy—which never diluted whereas both radiation and matter did—came to dominate and now constitutes about 70 percent of the Universe’s energy density.
Before Einstein proposed his theory of relativity, people thought only about relative energy—the difference in energy between one setup and another. But equipped with Einstein’s theory, we learned that the absolute amount of energy is itself meaningful and produces a gravitational force that can contract or expand the Universe. The big mystery about dark energy is not why it exists—quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity suggest it should be present and Einstein’s theory tells us it has physical consequences—but why its density is so low. Given it’s dominance, this might not seem to be an issue. But although dark energy makes up most of the Universe’s energy today, it is only recently—after matter and radiation were diluted enormously by the Universe’s expansion—that the influence of dark energy began to compete with that of the other types of energy. Earlier on, the dark energy density was minuscule compared to the other much larger radiation and matter contributions. Without knowing the answer in advance, physicists would have estimated that the dark energy density should be an astounding 120 orders of magnitude bigger. The question of the small size of the cosmological constant has flummoxed physicists for years.
Many astronomers say that we now live in a renaissance era of cosmology, in which theories and observations have advanced to the stage where precisely calibrated tests will help pin down which ideas are realized in the Universe. However, given the dominance of dark energy and dark matter, and even the mystery of why so much ordinary matter has survived to today, physicists also joke that we live in the dark ages.
But these mysteries are precisely what make this an exciting time for anyone investigating the cosmos. Scientists have made a great deal of progress in understanding the dark sector, yet big questions remain for which we are poised to make progress. For a researcher like me, this is the optimal situation.
Perhaps one can say that physicists studying “the dark” are participating in a Copernican revolution in a more abstract form. Not only is the Earth not physically the center of the Universe, but our physical makeup is not central to its energy budget—or even to most of its matter. And, just as the first object in the cosmos that people studied was the Earth—the object with which they were most familiar—physicists focused first on the matter of which we are made, which is the most readily accessible, obvious, and essential to our lives. Exploring the geographically varying and challenging territory of the Earth wasn’t always easy. But as demanding as the Earth was to fully understand, it was more accessible and easier to study than its more distant counterparts—the far-out regions of the Solar System and outer space beyond.
Similarly, discerning the most basic elements of even ordinary matter was challenging, but its study has been far more straightforward than investigating the “transparent” dark matter that is invisible—but present all around us.
However, the situation is now turning. The study of dark matter is very promising today in that it should be explained by conventional particle physics principles and furthermore should be amenable to a wide variety of currently active experimental probes. Despite the weakness of its interactions, scientists have a real chance in the coming decade of identifying and deducing the nature of dark matter. And, because dark matter clusters into galaxies and other structures, upcoming observations of the galaxy and the Universe will allow physicists and astronomers to measure it in newer ways. Furthermore, as we will see, dark matter might even account for some peculiarities of our Solar System related to meteoroid impacts and the course of life’s development on Earth. Dark matter is not separated in space (and it’s real) so the Starship Enterprise won’t transport us there. But with the ideas and technology currently in the works, dark matter is poised to be the final frontier—or at least the next exciting one.
fn1 To be precise, black holes have been proposed as a possible dark matter candidate—a topic we will get to later. Observational constraints and theoretical issues now make this scenario very unlikely.
When walking down the sidewalks of Manhattan or driving along the streets of Hollywood, you sometimes sense that a famous person is near. Even if you don’t see George Clooney directly, the disruptive traffic generated by the waiting crowd armed with cell phones and cameras suffices to alert you to a celebrity’s proximity. Though you detect the presence only indirectly, through George’s substantial influence on everyone else around, you can nonetheless be confident that someone special is near.
Sometimes when you walk through a forest, a flock of birds will suddenly go wild overhead or a buck will run across your path. You might never directly encounter the hiker or hunter that set these animals in motion. Even so, the motion of the animals introduces the sportsmen and helps to tell their story.
We don’t see dark matter, but—like the celebrity or the hunter—it influences its surroundings. Astronomers have used these indirect influences to infer the presence of dark matter. Today’s measurements tell us about dark matter’s energy contribution with ever-increasing precision. Though gravity is a weak force, sufficiently large quantities of dark matter have a measurable influence—and there is indeed a lot of it in the Universe. We don’t yet know dark matter’s true nature, but the measurements I’ll now describe demonstrate that dark matter is a real and essential component of our world. Dark matter, though so far invisible to our eyes or direct observations, doesn’t completely hide.
Fritz Zwicky was an independent thinker who had some impressive insights as well as some nonsensical ones. He was keenly aware of his oddball status, and even intended to write an autobiography titled Operation Lone Wolf. His reputation might partly explain why, even though in 1933 he made one of the most spectacular discoveries of the twentieth century, it wasn’t taken seriously for another forty years.
Yet Zwicky’s 1933 deduction was indeed remarkable. He observed the velocities of galaxies in the Coma Cluster (a cluster is a large collection of gravitationally bound galaxies). The gravitational attraction of the matter within a cluster competes with the kinetic energy of the stars it contains to create a stable system. With too low a mass, the gravitational attraction of the cluster won’t prevent the stars’ kinetic energy from driving them away. Based on his measurements of the velocity of the stars, Zwicky calculated that the amount of mass required for the cluster to have sufficient gravitational pull was 400 times greater than the contribution of the measured luminous mass—the matter that emits light. To account for all that extra matter, Zwicky proposed the existence of what he named dunkle Materie, which is German for dark matter and sounds either more ominous or sillier depending on how you pronounce it.
The brilliant and prolific Dutch astronomer Jan Oort came to a similar conclusion about dark matter a year earlier than Zwicky. Oort recognized that the velocities of stars in our local galactic neighborhood were too high for their motion to be attributed solely to the gravitational influence of light-emitting matter. Oort too deduced that something was missing. He didn’t conjecture a new form of matter, however, but merely nonluminous ordinary stuff—a proposal that has since been rejected for several reasons that I’ll discuss below.
But Oort might not have been the first to make this discovery either. At a cosmology conference that I recently attended in Stock-holm, my Swedish colleague Lars Bergstrom told me about the relatively unknown observations of the Swedish astronomer, Knut Lundmark, who had observed matter missing from galaxies two years earlier even than Oort. Although Lundmark, like Oort, hadn’t made the more daring suggestion of an entirely new form of matter, his measurements for the ratio of dark matter to invisible matter most closely approximated the true value, which we now know to be about five.
Yet despite these early observations, dark matter for a long time was essentially ignored. The idea was resurrected only in the 1970s when astronomers observed the motion of satellite galaxies—small galaxies in the vicinity of larger ones—that could be explained only by the presence of additional, unseen matter. These and other observations began to turn dark matter into a topic of serious inquiry.
But its status was truly solidified by the work of Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who worked with the astronomer Kent Ford. After receiving her graduate degree from Georgetown University, Rubin decided to measure the angular motion of stars in galaxies—starting with Andromeda—in part to avoid trespassing on other scientists’ overly protected ground. She changed the direction of her research after her thesis—which measured galaxy velocities and confirmed the existence of galaxy clusters—was initially rejected by most of the scientific community, in part for the ungallant reason that it trod on others’ scientific domain. For her postgraduate work, Rubin decided to enter a less crowded research field, so she decided to study the orbital speeds of stars.
Rubin’s decision led to what is perhaps the most exciting discovery of her time. In the 1970s, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford found that the rotational velocities of stars were pretty much the same at any distance from the galactic center. That is, stars rotated with constant velocity, even well beyond the region containing luminous matter. The only possible explanation was some as-yet unaccounted-for matter that helps rein in the farther-out stars, which moved far more quickly than expected. Without this additional contribution, the stars with the velocities that Rubin and Ford measured would fly off out of the galaxy. These researchers’ remarkable deduction was that ordinary matter accounted for only about a sixth of the mass that was required to keep them in orbit. Rubin and Ford’s observations yielded the strongest evidence at the time for dark matter, and galaxy rotation curves have continued to be an important clue.
velocity dispersions—