In fact, 44 years ago this month, astronomer Vera Rubin published her famous paper with indirect evidence about the need for dark matter. Both dark matter and dark energy are assumptions. However, these alternatives suffer from an important problem: they don’t explain away all the disparities, whereas the dark matter and dark energy hypotheses do. Their studies make heavy use of simulations to understand how the universe would look if there were certain kinds of dark matter or dark energy. But for now, we have no choice but to draw all our inferences about dark matter and dark energy from indirect evidence alone.

Source: The Hindu June 17, 2024 16:50 UTC