Astronomers, cosmologists, and theoretical physicists call dark matter a hypothetical form of matter that does not emit electromagnetic radiation, nor does it interact directly with it. Due to this property, direct observation of this substance is considered impossible.
The conclusions about the existence of dark matter were made on the basis of numerous indirect signs of the behavior of space objects and on the gravitational effects created by these objects. The study of the nature of dark matter, according to many scientists, will allow science to answer many questions regarding the origin of the universe.
It is believed that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago as a result of the Big Bang and has been continuously expanding since then. This is evidenced by the well-known Hubble's law, according to which the farther from us an astronomical object is, the greater its relative speed. Thanks to this, astronomers concluded that everything that exists originated in a small vanishing point.
In the second half of the last century, experts started talking about invisible dark matter, since they lacked something to explain the movement of stars. Scientists have concluded that dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the total mass-energy of our universe. By comparison, ordinary matter is only 5 percent of it.
Observing explosions of white dwarfs in binary stars in the 1990s, experts concluded that there is a third component - the so-called dark energy, which makes up about 68 percent of the cosmos and is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.
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A team of American and Hungarian researchers recently made a potentially sensational statement, saying that mysterious dark energy may not exist at all.
According to scientists, any traditional model of cosmology ignores the structure of the Universe, since it implies that matter has the same density in space. In their research, experts have thrown aside the postulate of a uniform distribution of ordinary and dark matter, suggesting that the Universe has a kind of channels filled with emptiness. Based on this assumption, the Americans and Hungarians modeled a new computer model for the expansion of the universe.
It turned out that the Universe is indeed expanding inhomogeneously, but the acceleration of this process in certain places is associated not with dark energy, but with a large amount of empty space. And such a void should occupy just about 68 percent of the entire universe.
If this hypothesis is confirmed, then it can change our understanding of the model of the world, and therefore affect the study of its processes, in particular, make us revise some laws of physics.