Wot’s all this, now?

Today I begin a new feature, which I will try to update once a week: the Alphabet of Cosmology. In these entries, I’ll highlight a  concept, experiment, or observation in cosmology—the study of the history, contents, and evolution of the Universe—that may not be as familiar to non-specialists.

(I stole borrowed this idea from Brian Switek, whose Dinosaur Alphabet series is a great way to learn about dinosaur species that aren’t the usual famous ones covered in books or on TV shows.)

The dark matter problem in boxer brief

About 80% of the mass in the Universe isn’t the same stuff familiar from daily life. The name we give our ignorance is dark matter, and we generally assume it to be a particle of some kind. We see its effects in the motion of stars and gas in galaxies, in the way galaxies cluster…