• Question: What are dark energy and dark matter?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      We still don’t understand a lot about the universe but we can’t explain observations like the fact that the universe appears to be constantly expanding. Dark matter and dark energy are part of one of the theories that helps explain this and they are called dark because they don’t give out light so we can’t see them with current telescopes.

    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Like Lynne suggested, more is unknown than is known about dark energy and matter. According to NASA (who certainly know more than I do about this):

      “We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe’s expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t be called “normal” matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.”

      More can be found here: http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/

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