• Question: Does dark matter really matter?

    Asked by wiktor_wochna to Aaron, Abbey, Keith, Natalie on 18 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Aaron Boardley

      Aaron Boardley answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      Good question!

      Does space matter? Does the moon matter? Does gravity matter? Does magnetism matter? There’s no right or wrong answers to these things – it all depends on what we, as a society, think is important. All we can really say is whether something has a big impact on our lives or not.

      However, some science can be pursued just out of an interest of how the universe works. The thing with this is sometimes we find out things that are really useful, even if we weren’t looking for them.

      When Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, it could be easy to say ‘so what?’ – as it might not seem to matter in our everyday lives. However, these days calculations involving relativity are involved in every satnav and GPS device – from your car to your iPhone – they wouldn’t work otherwise.

      So does dark matter matter? Maybe not yet. But who knows what investigating it might reveal for the future.

    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 20 Nov 2015:

      Well, to answer this question I first have to explain what dark matter is (or rather, what we think it is). Now, astrophysicists have been looking through their telescopes and taking measurements and making calculations for a very long time. It turns out that their numbers just don’t add up based on what they can see is in the universe – there has to be some extra mass somewhere out there for the stars and planets to be behaving the way they do. They hypothesised that there could be extra stuff out there that isn’t visible through telescopes, and they dubbed it ‘dark matter’.

      I’d say dark matter does in fact matter, since if it doesn’t exist then our whole understanding of the universe is flawed, and we will have to rethink a lot of basic stuff. If it DOES exist then it still matters because we have to find some way of finding it, to prove our theories.

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