You hear that 95% percent of the universe might consist of dark matter and physysists seem to be searching the galaxy in order to find the stuff. Could it be possible that dark matter is right here–even amongst my mac and cheese dinner?
Only if it has no mass.
The only thing strange in my mac and cheese is a can of ortegas.
Well, when Barb makes macaroni and cheese from scratch, in the oven, there is often a coating of dark matter on the top. Tasty, too!
Could it be possible that Dark Matter is just the convient name we’ve given to the multitude of unamed subatomic particles? Should I look for this stuff in my soup or in my telescope?
Your mac and cheese is, indeed, dark matter, in so far as it’s not glowing. But it’s not the interesting type of dark matter. While some dark matter is ordinary matter, as demonstrated by your maccaroni, ordinary matter makes up only a small fraction (perhaps as much as a tenth) of the total amount of dark matter. The other forms of dark matter (whatever they are) are probably more evenly distributed than normal matter, so even though there’s more weird stuff in total, here on Earth normal matter is still much more abundant, since normal matter is rather clumped here.
Dark matter is presumably composed of a multitude of subatomic particles, some of which may be named already. The problem is finding enough particles which are present in large enough amounts to make up the missing mass. Every time a particle physicist hypothesizes some new particle, it’s always suggested that this hypothetical particle might be some or all of the dark matter. Most of these candidate particles remain hypothetical, however, and have not yet been directly detected.
Incidentally, dark matter is not 95% of the Universe, but only about 25%. The other 70% is dark energy, which is even weirder than dark matter, and about which we know even less. For starters, dark energy has a negative pressure (and a very large negative pressure, compared to its energy), and feels a gravitational repulsion, rather than attraction.
Do you actually enjoy your mac and cheese when it’s that cold? And how do you manage to get it to 0K anyways?
From what I have seen (I think someone already said this…), Dark matter covers all matter that is not producing its own light (fusioning, etc). This actually does include Light itself (you can’t “see” light unless it hits you), neutrinos, sub-atomic knowns and unknowns, and any other undiscovered particles and cosmic rays.
My guess is that your cheeseburger is not fusioning, but new things do happen.
Well, probably more like 310 or 320K. But if you took a huge mound of mac and cheese at that temperature, and stuck it in deep space, our telescopes probably wouldn’t pick it up, so for practical purposes, it’s dark matter.
And strictly speaking, light itself would be considered dark matter, but we have a very good handle on how much light there is in the Universe, and it’s negligible compared even to baryonic matter (at least in the present Universe: There was a radiation-dominated period early in the Universe’s history).