• skibidi@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Bit of a nitpick, we don’t know that the dark matter is pervasive throughout the universe. What we observe is that galaxies and galaxy clusters are held together too strongly to be explained by our current theory of gravity, and the motions of galaxies within clusters do not match the gravitational forces that are known to act on them from observed matter - The Milky Way for instance is spinning fast enough for the stars on the edges to be flung off into intergalactic space.

    One solution to this contradictory observation is that there is bunch of extra mass we can’t see (dark matter) that is holding the galaxies and clusters together. Every experiment designed to detect dark matter has failed, and more serious work is going into adjusting theories of gravity as a result. However no adjusted theory has arisen that can explain every observation either, so physics is a bit lost at the moment.