Remember when you were in elementary school and you would be given coloring sheets? The red crayons might have been used to color barns and clothes, and blue would color the sky. 

Dark matter is the blue of the universe, filling in the gaps between the other colors.

But what is dark matter? Is it like a really dark colored…thing?

Think less ‘dark’ and more ‘invisible’. We didn’t discover it until recently, since it wasn’t being picked up by our usual devices, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. It doesn’t give off any light or energy, which are the main ways those instruments spot matter. 

Dark energy (which isn’t the same as dark matter) and dark matter are both invisible to typical space-viewing instruments, which is why they both have ‘dark’ in their name. Dark matter secures the universe, but dark energy divides it.

Quite a bit of the space in, well, space, is made up of dark matter. 27% to be exact, according to NASA. Dark energy is 68%. 

We thought space was big already, and for the most part, we’ve only been studying the last scrappy 5%– visible matter.

Despite this huge number, we know close to nothing about dark matter. Seriously, you’d think that if dark matter comprised so much of the universe, we would at least know what it’s made of. We can only guess.

It serves as a binding agent, the superglue of the universe. When dark energy tries to pull things apart, dark matter keeps them together. 

We don’t know what it’s made of. Keeping in mind that visible matter is made up of baryon particles, there are two possibilities. 

1. Dark matter is made up of baryonic matter, like visible matter, but if the baryonic matter was under a few certain conditions, it may be able to avoid giving off light and energy.
2. Dark matter is not made up of baryonic matter, and is instead made up of other types of matter that we know much less about.

I encourage you to look it up if you want to know more! Humanity is like a mirror, reflecting the colors it sees and sharing that light with others. The more colors, or knowledge, you have, the more beautiful the world.