Yes, the universe is ballooning and what are the causes? Zwicky was the one who was able to understand. At the first time he realized the expansion, he tried to add all the stars and clusters so he could see every object at Coma Cluster to determine whether it was occurred because of gravity. But, it turned out that galaxy would not make the speed in a fast movement. So, he made an assumption about the causes and went into an idea about there was something unseen about this causing. It was hidden from the view and he coined dunkle materie which means dark matter in German language.
Several years later, the universe still going to expand and yet we are still not able to detect this so called Dark Matter. In 1970, the similar phenomena happened to Zwicky was repeatedly occurred but the mystery remained unraveled. Vera Rubin, an astronomer, observed the Andromeda Galaxy and found there was one single stars that acted uncommon. The stars rotated the galaxy so fast and it excluded from the void but close to the orbit. And this phenomenon existed again when in 1980 she observed another 100 galaxies.
What is a dark matter itself? Well, every scientist around the world is still looking the answer throughout theories and experiments. Many of them believe that this matter is very important since the Higgs-Boson particle had discovered. You may find the answer on my previous article about dark matter reveals the hidden secrets.
The race of searching dark matter has moved the scientists from any surface laboratories to the outer or deeper the Earth. For example, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) is located deeper below the planet. This facility is supported by liquid xenon installed in a tank with temperature around 100 Centigrade below zero. And it is in the middle of detecting the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) which are currently passing through the planet.
The work of this facility is when the atom from the cosmic ray emitted to the Earth, it will pass the tank and causes the atom to be separated. The collision among them will cause the separated-particles to begin the fluorescence flashes. But honestly, it is not something easy to catch. The hunt is not finished yet for may be several hundred years later.
Among physicist around the world, this facility is not the only one which hunts the dark matter. One team of researchers had installed the facility IceCube – it is literally not the name of American Rapper – which literally speaking is an underground facility located 2.5 kilometers below. Amazingly, it is located in the north pole so the temperature is so freeze. The frozen atmosphere creates the facility to detect the dark matter in sensitive situation. The facilities located in the Antarctic continents is controlled from far away. It is remotely well-functioned and it is able to detect the WIMPS from the Sun-ray.
Another facility is located hundreds of kilometres above our head. In 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was moved to the International Space Station and it had been installed in the same year to detect the neutrino which is generated from collision or separation of WIMPS. The works of AMS gave good result in 2013 when it detected the particles called positrons in high numbers in the space. However, it is not yet able to help in understanding of dark matter.
In conclusion, the search of dark matter is very important in understanding of universe because this so-called particle is believed to cause the rotation among planets, stars and galaxies. Moreover, the search has invited many countries to collect many related data to reveal the hidden secrets of universe.