It seems to us that most of the universe is made up of something we simply call dark energy. The way to think of this unknown and possibly unknowable energy is not so much as a force that’s expanding the universe than as something that’s producing more and more space. And the more space this energy/thing produces, the faster and faster it produces space. Dark energy, according to this understanding, is about 71 percent of everything. Then, there is this cold and dark matter, which is believed to be sub-atomic particles that have weak interactions with the normal, everyday stuff. (It’s dark because it’s light-less.) In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which carefully and precisely measured the relic radiation from what we can only call the beginning of the universe (but, of course, there was no beginning in the normal sense of the word or even an explosion in the normal sense of that word), showed the universe is flat and that these strange and light-less particles made up about 24 percent of everything. Dark matter is also believed to play role in the formation of galaxies. The rest (5 percent) is everything that really matters and makes sense to us.
This understanding of the universe was pretty stable until yesterday, when the researchers of a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature claimed to have found a galaxy that has very little or no dark matter. This is a ghostly galaxy. Scientists can see right through it like a phantom floating over a bed in a haunted house. It’s name is NGC 1052-DF2.
Scientific American reports:
[Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and his team] found star clusters moving languidly around NGC 1052-DF2, a sign that there may well be very little or no dark matter within that galaxy at all. That suggests dark matter can be decoupled not only from regular, visible matter, but from entire galaxies—a phenomenon astronomers have never seen until now.
The dark matter-less galaxy was discovered with a telescope that van Dokkum invented and Roberto Abraham built in New Mexico. The purpose of this telescope, named Dragonfly Telephoto Array, was to make ghostly galaxies more visible, more present, more there. Data from observations made on this and other instruments around the world eliminated all other explanations but one: this galaxy did not interact with or have any dark matter. Objects in it move much slower than objects in normal galaxies. If all of this is correct, the discovery will leave “all theories about galaxy formation” in a new state of suspension.
I’m of the opinion that the universe is as knowable as it is unknowable. This is not a riddle. It’s a fact drawn from two scientific observations: one, galaxies that are close to us are getting closer to us, and those that are far from us, are leaving us at a faster and faster rate. There will be a time when the light from those departing galaxies with not be able to cross the space generated by dark energy. So, those who might live in that distant, distant time will see a completely different universe. And no matter how much they know about it, they will never be able to know what we know, at this point in cosmic history—13.7 billion years after the universe came to be. Because those intelligent beings of a universe that’s 20 billion or so years old can never see what we observed and verified, it will not exist. The thing that the mind has to grasp is that this non-existence is as present as what exists. This is not the being and not-being transition that Hegel describes as becoming in his abstruse Science of Logic. This is a total absence and a total presence that cannot be bridged, but is knowable to those turned in the future. Death is something that can only seen but not experienced
