Feb 19, 2022 By: yunews
Dr. Edward Belbruno, clinical professor of mathematics and recipient of the Humboldt Award of Germany in Mathematics for 2017-18, has co-authored a paper with Dr. James Green, former chief scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that will be published this month. The paper gives new breakthrough insights on the deep mystery of the nature and composition of dark matter in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Dark matter is the material that makes up most of the matter in the universe but itself has not yet been directly measured.
“When leaving the Solar system: Dark matter makes a difference” details a spacecraft mission by which NASA could possibly measure dark matter directly for the very first time.
“It was recently discovered in the past few decades,” said Dr. Belbruno, “that about 98% of all the matter in our galaxy and other galaxies is invisible, and we have no idea what it is. This was shocking, to say the least.” In other words, all the stars, planets, solar systems, black holes, interstellar gas and so on only make up about two percent of reality.
“This substance has never been directly detected,” explained Dr. Belbruno, “only indirectly by astronomers watching how it affects the movement of stars and clusters of stars in the Milky Way. This paper explores a way that NASA could directly measure it, which is very exciting.”
The paper models, using brain-achingly complicated mathematics, a galactic force for our solar system for both dark matter and what is known as baryonic matter (the usual matter we are made of). “This force comes from the entire Milky Way galaxy,” Dr. Belbruno pointed out. “For our solar system location in the galaxy, about 50% of the force is due to dark matter. If you were far out in the Milky Way, far beyond the Sun's distance from the center of the Galaxy, then about 98% of this force would be due to dark matter.”
The paper goes on to show how this force can affect the trajectories of motion for spacecraft far from the Sun, which has never been done before and provides, for the first time, a new force to include in the software used to model aerospace engineering for space missions.
Dr. Belbruno and Dr. Green conclude by outlining a future NASA mission, called the Interstellar Probe, that could possibly directly detect dark matter. By traveling up to 400 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth (with a goal of possibly reaching 1,000 AU), the build-up of dark matter—the 98% referenced above—might be so dense as to make it detectable so that it can be analyzed. (AU refers to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, roughly equal to 150 million kilometres [93 million miles] or about 8 light minutes.)
“Dark matter has never been directly measured before,” Dr. Belbruno said with great enthusiasm, “so this would be very significant!”
NASA also created its own presentation on the publication of this significant paper, which is reprinted below. Thank you to Elizabeth Landau at NASA for her assistance with this.
Interviews and Articles
- The force of dark matter is with you — and something could measure it (Yahoo!)
- NASA Proposes Sending Spacecraft to Measure Mysterious Dark Matter (Futurism)
- Quelles possibilités pour mesurer la matière noire? (Science & Vie)
NASA also created its own presentation on the publication of this significant paper, which is reprinted below. Thank you to Elizabeth Landau at NASA for her assistance with this.