What’s Dark Matter made of?....................
dark matter.
Dark matter is a placeholder. It’s sort of a shorthand way of saying that there is more mass in the universe than what can presently be observed.
No one can say. But as it’s gravitationally interactive, one would expect to see huge globules of the stuff crashing into visible bodies throughout the cosmos. Yet no such interactions are seen. Thus it seems but a device to explain something not yet explainable.
“fudge factor” i.e. we don’t know anything except that it makes the equations work....
There are two competing theories: WIMP’s vs. MACHO’s. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are hypothetical ghost particles that (besides gravitationally) interact only weakly or not at all with normal matter, sort of like the neutrino. But unlike the neutrino, they are massive enough to clump around galaxies. The room you’re sitting in could be filled with them but there is no way to detect them.
MAssive Compact Halo Objects are things like black holes, neutron stars, even brown dwarfs. But they would have to be in great enough numbers to account for all the mass of dark matter.
So far, ironically, WIMP’s seem to be winning out over MACHO’s as the leading theory.
The existence of Dark Matter was actually discovered by Fritz Zwicky back in 1933, when he noticed gravitational interactions between galaxy clusters that their visible mass couldn’t account for. He was an underrated scientist then and today.
Supposition.
The fevered dreams of materialists.