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READ: WIMPs
WIMPs
![[~]/WIMPS_NASA.jpg](/pluginfile.php/5411/mod_page/content/1/WIMPS_NASA.jpg "[~]/WIMPS_NASA.jpg")
Image of the Milky Way Galaxy. Colors indicate where
WIMP particles are located. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Public domain.
Another possibility is that the universe contains a lot of matter that is unlike anything we have ever encountered. For example, scientists have proposed that there might be particles that have mass but don’t interact much with other matter. Scientists call these theoretical particles WIMPs, which stands for Weakly Interactive Massive Particles. WIMPs would have a gravitational effect on other matter because of their mass. But because they don’t interact much with ordinary matter, they would be very difficult or impossible to detect directly.
Most scientists who study dark matter believe that the universe’s dark matter is a combination of ordinary matter and some kind of exotic matter that we haven’t discovered yet. Most scientists also think that ordinary matter is much less than half of the total matter in the universe. Researching dark matter is clearly an active area of scientific research, and astronomers’ knowledge about dark matter changing rapidly.
Source
David Bethel
http://ck12.org/flexr/assemble/?fid=732 (CC BY-SA)
http://ck12.org/flexr/assemble/?fid=732 (CC BY-SA)
Last modified: Tuesday, 24 August 2010, 1:36 PM