Dark Matter

I'm going to introduce something that is still unknown and is greatly studied today in astrophysics, Dark Matter. What is Dark Matter? Well simply put it's matter that can not be detected by any means, it emits no light or any electromagnetic frequency: gamma rays, x-rays, radio, or microwave. It is undetectable by normal means, however you might ask, how is it then that we know it's there? It is detectable indirectly by the gravitational lensing it produces from galaxies behind it in our line of sight. The gravitational lensing causes the galaxies light to bend around the Dark Matter causing the galaxy to appear elsewhere. As shown on the picture above, the light (white arrow) gets bent around and we perceive it to come from the location of the orange arrows. This allows us to indirectly detect the existence of the Dark Matter and calculations have shown that it makes up approximately 25% of the universe whereas normal matter makes up a measly 5% and the rest is in the form of Dark Energy which I will talk about later. Unfortunately that is about where our knowledge of Dark Matter ends, we don't know what it is made of or how it interacts exactly within the universe. It is a great topic of research and discovery, and hopefully within a few years we will have the answers we seek.