Related papers: Does Physics Need 'Dark Matter'?
Modern cosmology successfully deals with the origin and the evolution of the Universe at large scales, but it is unable to completely answer the question about the nature of the fundamental objects that it is describing. As a matter of…
The understanding of the physical processes that lead to the origin of matter in the early Universe, creating both an excess of matter over anti-matter that survived until the present and a dark matter component, is one of the most…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
Well known scaling laws among the structural properties of the dark and the luminous matter in disc systems are too complex to be arisen by two inert components that just share the same gravitational field. This brings us to critically…
Answering well-known fundamental questions is usually regarded as the major goal of science. Discovery of other unknown and fundamental questions is, however, even more important. Recognition that "we didn't know anything" is the basic…
Observations in the optical, in X-rays, and gravitational lensing of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and large-scale structure are beginning to provide clues to the dark matter problem. I review the impact of these observations on some of…
To the astrophysicist faced with the puzzle of dark matter, this one appears under two different aspects: on the one hand in cosmology, i.e. at very large scales, where it seems to be made of a bath of particles; on the other hand at the…
For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
Over the past few decades, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. I begin with a review of the observational evidence for the existence of dark matter: rotation curves of…
I give a review of the development of the concept of dark matter. The dark matter story passed through several stages from a minor observational puzzle to a major challenge for theory of elementary particles. Modern data suggest that dark…
We review the features of Dark Matter as a particle, presenting some old and new instructive models, and looking for their physical implications in the early universe and in the process of structure formation. We also present a schematic of…
As cosmology has entered a phase of precision experiments, the content of the universe has been established to contain interesting and not yet fully understood components, namely dark energy and dark matter. While the cause and exact nature…
The nature of cosmological dark matter finds its explanation in physics beyond the Standard model of elementary particles. The landscape of dark matter candidates contains a wide variety of species, either elusive or hardly detectable in…
We review progress in understanding dark matter by astrophysics, and particularly via the effect of gravitational lensing. Evidence from many different directions now all imply that five sixths of the material content of the universe is in…
Newtonian mechanics indicates that galaxies and galaxy clusters are much more massive than we would have guessed from their luminosities, with the discrepancy being generally attributed to dark matter halos. An alternative hypothesis is…
The existence of Dark Matter (DM) is a well established fact since many decades, thanks to the observation of the effects of its gravitational interaction with the ordinary matter in the Universe. However, our knowledge of the Dark Matter…
The quest for the elusive dark matter (DM) that permeates the Universe (and in general the search for signatures of Physics beyond the Standard Model at astronomical scales) provides a unique opportunity and a tough challenge to the…
These lectures have been given to particle physicists, mostly experimentalists and very briefly and at a pedestrian level review the problems of dark matter. The content of the lectures is the following: 1. Introduction. 2. Cosmological…
A review of the study of dark matter is given, starting with earliest studies and finishing with the establishment of the standard Cold Dark Matter paradigm in mid 1980-s. Particular attention is given to the collision of the classical and…