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Dark matter: a topic that matters

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An appalling issue for physicists is that there is an ever increasing number of mysteries that we have not been able to solve just yet. One of the topics that keeps us awake at night is dark matter. Today I am going to talk about some of the observations that have led us to theorize about dark matter and the difficulties of measuring it. Our problems are the following: there are stars orbiting the center of their galaxies faster than it should be possible for them to do. If they were moving at such high velocity, they should, somehow, fly away. But they don’t. Therefore, there must be something offsetting that velocity, and that is where dark matter enters the game. Another strange occurance is the warping of light around a massive body, called gravitational lensing. This is a phenomenon that occurs when a massive celestial body, such as a galaxy cluster, causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens. But there is bending

Black holes: what would happen if we fell into one of them?

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     The most common question about black holes is “what are them?” It is an object in space that has a gravitational pull with so much strength that not even light can escape. This is because it has so much mass contained within such a small volume. Although you may have heard that black holes suck into them everything outside their event horizon, which is kind of like its edge, this is perhaps the greatest cosmic misconception of all. It is very funny and more accurate to think a black hole not as a vacuum cleaner, but as a giant cosmic Cookie Monster. Sure, every cookie in the nearby vicinity will find its way into the area near Cookie Monster's mouth. The cookies get funneled inside towards it. But the overwhelming majority of the cookie matter that approaches Cookie Monster's mouth won't end up getting devoured; instead, it gets spit out in all directions, having been accelerated by a variety of chaotic forces. Black holes are the messiest eaters imaginable.      Where