Related papers: Dark Matter
One of the great scientific enigmas still unsolved, the existence of dark matter, is reviewed. Simple gravitational arguments imply that most of the mass in the Universe, at least 90%, is some (unknown) non-luminous matter. Some particle…
In the standard model of cosmology, the present evolution of the Universe is determined by the presence of two components of unknown nature. One of them is referenced as ``dark matter'' to justify the fact that it behaves cosmologically…
In this article we address the mystery of dark matter. We expound the various evidences, astrophysical and cosmological, leading to hypothesize the existence of an invisible form of matter, whose attempts at detecting it have so far all…
This paper provides a review of the variants of dark matter which are thought to be fundamental components of the universe and their role in origin and evolution of structures and some new original results concerning improvements to the…
A short story of dark matter as an example of a scientific revolution is given. The characteristics of stellar populations are compared with those of dark halos. The mean mass-to-luminosity ratio of stellar populations is found to be 4 in…
Over the past decade, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. The observational evidence for the existence of dark matter is reviewed: rotation curves of galaxies, weak lensing…
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…
The dynamics of the universe may be dominated by novel weakly interacting elementary particles, by baryons in an invisible form, by black holes, and globally by vacuum energy. The main arguments for and against such hypotheses are reviewed.
The astronomical dark matter is an essential component of the Universe and yet its nature is still unresolved. It could be made of neutral and massive elementary particles which are their own antimatter partners. These dark matter species…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
The nature of dark matter is one of the open problems of the Standard Model of particle physics. Despite the great experimental efforts, we have not yet found a positive signal of its interactions with ordinary matter. One possible…
The universe is composed of ordinary matter (for example, stars, planets, ourselves), dark matter and dark energy. The estimated percentage of dark matter is about $27\%$ of the entire universe, while $5\%$ is ordinary matter and the…
[A brief review intended for a general physics colloquium audience.] Astrophysicists now know that 80% of the matter in the universe is `dark matter', composed of neutral and weakly interacting elementary particles that are not part of the…
More than sixty years ago Zwicky made the case that the great clusters of galaxies are held together by the gravitational force of unseen (dark) matter. Today, the case is stronger and more precise: Dark, nonbaryonic matter accounts for 30%…
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…
We discuss an overlooked factor in dark matter studies. Namely, if massless particles are captured into a local structure and stop free streaming in the universe, they no longer lose energy by cosmological red-shift, and no longer smear out…
Dark matter is, arguably, the most widely discussed topic in contemporary particle physics. Written in the language of particle physics and quantum field theory, these notes focus on a set of standard calculations needed to understand…
For the first time, we have a plausible and complete accounting of matter and energy in the Universe. Expressed a fraction of the critical density it goes like this: neutrinos, between 0.3% and 15%; stars, between 0.3% and 0.6%; baryons…
Cosmological and astrophysical measurements indicate that the universe contains a large amount of dark matter. A number of weak scale dark matter candidates have been proposed in extensions of the standard model. The potential to discover…