Dark Matter, the Sci-fi Series??

When crew members working on a derelict spaceship awaken from stasis (frozen animation or deep sleep were one ages very slowly), they have no memory of who they are or how they got onto the vessel. The only clues to their identities are weaponry and a destination -- a remote mining colony soon to become a war zone. They must band together to fight off the threats they face on a voyage filled with vengeance, betrayal and secrets that make survival a question mark for all on board the ship. In the wake of a betrayal, the crew is split up. Some are imprisoned, while others are sent away to start a new life. The sci-fi series is based on the graphic novel of the same name.

Where else is this Dark matter used?

In transformers: Age of extinction, they often refer to “dark matter drives” as the engines to the space craft on which Optimus Prime is imprisoned at one point in the movie. This apparent dark matter provides the energy to power the ship across eons and light years in space. Distance between two points in space is measured in light years, the number of years it takes light to travel from that point in space to the other point in space.

Does this Dark matter actually exist?

Yes it actually does exist. But it is practically invisible hence the name dark. In some scientific circles it’s even theorized that there might be more dark matter in the universe than actual matter. So there may be more of what you cannot see than what you can see.

So what are the scientists saying about?

In an article in Forbes science journal we extracted:

Dark matter is the most elusive substance ever detected in the Universe, and even at that, it’s only been detected indirectly. We know it interacts gravitationally, but it’s so sparse and diffuse that Earth-based experiments don’t stand a chance at seeing that interaction. Instead, if we want to see this new form of matter directly, we have to hope that there’s an additional interaction: a way for dark matter to scatter off of normal matter, and produce a recoil due to a collision. In an announcement earlier today, the LUX Collaboration — running the Large Underground Xenon experiment — performed the longest, deepest, most sensitive search for dark matter ever, using 370 kilograms of liquid xenon with the detector running for a total of 20 months. The final result? Not a single dark matter collision was observed.

They went on to say:

A huge variety of astrophysical observations point to the existence of dark matter, and point to its presence in a massive halo surrounding every large galaxy ever observed. Dark matter is required to reproduce our observations of everything from galaxy rotation curves to the gravitational bending of light around clusters; from the large-scale filamentary structure of the Universe to the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background; from the correlations of galaxies 500 million light years apart to the existence of the tiniest mini-galaxies of all. Most spectacularly, we observe dark matter separating from normal matter when two massive galaxy clusters collide. Without dark matter, the explanations for these phenomena all fall apart; we know it must be real. But if it’s real, we really want to be able to detect it directly, under laboratory conditions. To do that, we need to know something about the particle nature of dark matter itself, because we need for it to interact with normal matter: with the particles in the Standard Model, the ones we know how to detect here on Earth.

Back to what the movies say. In most sci-fi movies, the ships achieve faster than light travel (FTL) and in a few of those they claim to fly in inter-dimensional space (I haven’t quite cracked the meaning of that yet either but when I do, I’ll write an article on it). Am of the view that this dark matter is somehow the key to turning a bit of that science fiction into science fact.

In the words of Albert Einstein, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Never stop being curious.