Don’t Go to the Dark Side

They call me the Space Cowboy because I poses an inquisitive mind.  I am working on a revised theory of gravity, that includes some major advancements and I feel like I am standing on the brink of a new scientific revolution that will radically change our views on the very nature of space, time and gravity.  I call my new theory the cloppsright and it is based on gravitational wave resonance and I feel this will replace the puzzling dark matter that has been used to explain how galaxies rotate much faster around the center than can currently be accounted for by the quantity of ordinary matter, like stars, planets and interstellar gasses.  This is the cutting edge of physics and it will alleviate the dichotomy of normal (or baryonic) and dark matter.  The familiar material of the universe, known as baryonic matter, is composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.

Dark matter has been the prevailing scientific explanation for the puzzling phenomenon of how galaxies behave, because it is thought that they contain much more mass than what is visible to astronomers.  According to theory, dark matter is the invisible mass that accounts for this behavior, and the undetectable substance which makes up five times more of the universe than the matter we can see.  Galaxies spin faster than they should, given the amount of matter we see in them.  Is there some unaccounted for mass generating that extra gravity, or is the amount of mass that we see generating more gravity than we thought?

The visible universe which includes the Earth, the Sun, other stars, and galaxies is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms.  Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century was that this ordinary, or baryonic matter that makes up less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe.  Physicists say that the rest of the universe appears to be made of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 percent) and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy (70 percent).  However, scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly.  It doesn’t interact with baryonic matter and it’s completely invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current instruments.

Scientists are confident that dark matter exists because of the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters.  It is thought that the stars at the edges of a spinning, spiral galaxy should travel much slower than those near the galactic center, where a galaxy’s visible matter is concentrated, but observations show that stars orbit at more or less the same speed regardless of where they are in the galactic disk.  This puzzling result is resolved by assuming that the boundary stars are feeling the gravitational effects of an unseen mass being called dark matter, in a halo around the galaxy.

Dark matter gave us a universe that contained more matter than could be seen by the naked eye, which is made up of material that scientists cannot directly observe, and this bizarre ingredient does not emit light or energy.  Does dark matter consists of exotic particles that don’t interact with normal matter or light, but that still exert a gravitational pull?  Support for dark matter has grown, and although no solid direct evidence of dark matter has been detected the motions of the stars tell us how much matter there is. Scientists calculated the mass of large objects in space by studying their motion.  It is theorized that clusters of galaxies would fly apart if the only mass they contained were visible to conventional astronomical measurements.  To hold the elements of the universe together, dark matter must make up approximately 80 percent of its matter.

My cloppsright theory accounts for the stars at the edges of a spinning, spiral galaxy being able to travel at the same speed as those near the galactic center, because of the gravitational wave resonance that has built up in the outer regions of every galaxy.  We do not need Erebus, ‘The Dark’ anymore, because the coalescing gravity waves will reinforce each other to produce this new way of thinking about galaxy motion.  Gone is the dark matter that made me blind!  I stumbled across this idea knowing that in order for darkness to disappear, a light must be shining in my brain.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie and Tale Weaver where the prompt is the nonsense word cloppsright.