The Dark Side of Universe - A story of the Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
Imagine gazing up at the night sky, awash in stars, and realizing that everything you see—every shining sun, every swirling galaxy—makes up just 5% of the universe. The rest? It’s the cosmic “dark side”: two mysterious forces we call dark matter and dark energy . But what are they, and why should we care? Let’s embark on a journey to meet these invisible architects of reality—and discover how scientists are slowly unmasking their secrets. Fig 1: Formation of dark matter structures in the Millenium XXL computer simulation. Image credits: MPA Garching . 1. The Ghostly Scaffold: Dark Matter In the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky peered at the Coma galaxy cluster and noticed something odd: the galaxies were moving too fast to be held together by visible stars alone. Decades later, Vera Rubin watched stars orbiting the edges of the Milky Way, and again—those stars should have flown off into space. The culprit? An unseen mass exerting gravity where no light shone. Dark matter , making u...