Dark Side of the Universe Would you believe me if I told everything you can see in the universe is only a small fraction of what is really out there? Well it is in fact that fraction is one third of the universe. There are two forces called dark energy which we just recently discovered and dark matter which we have some proof from but can’t actually prove. These forces have been battling since the big bang theory occurred yet neither has triumphed.
The big bang was a ripping open of time and space inflating in an instant to become an unimaginably hot cauldron of energy and matter. The big bang like the universe never had a center it just kept exploding and expanding. Big bang theory states that the universe is continually stretching between every object everywhere and making things move farther away. No matter where you look out you see light from the initial big bang
Scientist on June 30, 2001 launched a telescope to see further into space by finding the first light of space, telescope called WMAP. WMAP was sent to measure the light that came from the big bang now called the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most distant thing we can see is a hot glowing wall of plasma 13 billion miles away that is opaque so we can’t see through it due to the WMAP. Plasma has cooled enough that it isn’t uniform and featureless but has eddies and ripples. These tiny ripples are important without them we wouldn’t be here. If something was uniform it would always be uniform and it wouldn’t create planets or galaxies. At the beginning there was just a smooth distribution of two gases hydrogen and helium no stars.
There is a telescope center in Chile with two twin telescopes that look really far into the universe. The founder of these two telescopes is buried at the end of the hallway where they are. The astronomers plan on using a new instrument that only let in light from 700 specific galaxies that not only takes pictures but records their spectra. Building the special instrument took 6 years. Everything we know come from analyzing the stars lights through a prism or more commonly a diffraction grating It separates the suns light into three colors red blue green and you can tell the temperature from how much of the certain colors there are. There are lines on the spectrum that show what the star is made of, the temperature, and its size. When doing this across our galaxy you can tell exactly what the star is like. When they collected data they saw stars that had been forming 10 billion years ago showed into 1000 photons of light.
In 1970’s Vera Rubin became an astronomer and watched how stars moved in a spiral glazy like ours. She found out stars near the edge of galaxies were moving just as fast the ones close to the center. Earth is moving at half a million miles an hour. Her discoveries confirmed the idea of dark matter. Newton’s laws said that the velocities should rise and the fall rapidly but they didn’t they actually stayed the same at the end of the data. She actually implied that galaxies are haloed with dark matter that we can’t see but taking up most of the galaxy’s mass. Another scientist at the Linke observatory are trying to use iodine lines to see tiny shifts on stars spectrums that shows a star moving closer and further away from us. This wobble is due to planets tugging on it and also the wobble reveals the planet’s size. Debra the scientist and her colleagues have found some 70 of the 100 planets orbiting other stars. Most of the planets are huge and orbiting quickly. Debra’s team most dramatic discovery of the first star with 3 planets which attracted a fourth grade class’s attention and they asked if they had named the planets and they gave suggestion like fourpiter to the one that has a mass four times Jupiter’s, twopiter to the one with the mass twice as big as Jupiter’s, and dinky to the small one.
Planets are thought to have formed from discs of dust and gas that surround the sun. Scientist thought that