Despite the fact that it is believed to make up around eighty per cent of the matter in the universe, so-called "dark matter" remains an enigma to scientists. It is totally invisible as it neither absorbs or emits light, and its presence has so far been determined only via its gravitational interaction with visible matter.
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As Man probes ever deeper into the mysteries of the Universe, his search seems to yield more questions than answers. Some of the most mysterious phenomena discovered in space are dark matter and dark energy.
Approximately 80 per cent of the mass in known Universe is made up of "dark matter," a strange and intangible substance that yet scientists have not been able to identify or observe directly. Dark matter is not visible to the naked eye, and does not emit light or energy.
So how do we know it even exists?
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A team of scientists from Washington believe that they have managed to establish the exact size of the universe to within 1 per cent accuracy.
In a remarkable development, the researchers, who were working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), have been able to measure the distances to galaxies that are over 6 billion light years away.
"There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1-percent accuracy," said David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS. "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."
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Only 4% of the universe is made of known material. Stars and gas in galaxies move so fast that astronomers have speculated that the gravity from a hypothetical invisible halo of dark matter is needed to keep galaxies together. However, a solid understanding of dark matter as well as direct evidence of its existence has remained elusive.
A research team made up of astronomers from around the world believes that the interactions between dark and ordinary matter could be more important and more complex than previously thought, and even speculate that dark matter might not exist and that the anomalous motions of stars in galaxies are due to a modification of gravity on extragalactic scales.
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