Could dark matter be the same thing as dark energy? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Dec, 2024
Two parts of our Universe that seem to be unavoidable are dark matter and dark energy. Could they really be two aspects of the same thing?
When it comes to the Universe, what you can easily see isn’t always reflective of all there is. It’s one of the important reasons why theories and observations/measurements need to go hand-in-hand: observations tell you what’s there to the best of our measurement capabilities, and theory allows us to compare what we’d expect to occur versus what’s actually seen. When they match up, that’s generally an indication that we have a pretty good understanding of what’s actually going on. But when they don’t, that’s a sign that one of two things is occurring:
- either the theoretical rules we’re applying aren’t quite right for this situation,
- or there are additional ingredients out there that our observations haven’t directly revealed.
Many of the biggest mismatches in the Universe — between what we observe and what we would have expected based solely on what we see — point to two additional ingredients: dark matter and dark energy. But these two seemingly unrelated phenomena have something deeply disconcerting in common: they’ve only ever been detected…
