Everybody enjoys a good mystery. And boy, right now there’s a doozie of a mystery in cosmology. Cosmology is the “big picture” of astronomy. Cosmology attempts to understand the creation on the largest scale. The mystery today is dark matter. I’ll get to dark matter, but it’s important to know that astronomy has struggled with mysteries before.

The Big Bang Theory of cosmology is accepted by most astronomers today. Nearly sixty years ago when I was a sophomore in college, that wasn’t the case. At that time, expansion of the universe was accepted, but a mystery played out among astronomers. Two theories competed to explain expansion and the creation. One theory, the Steady State theory, proposed the universe had no beginning. It has always been expanding and always will. The Big Bang theory proposed the universe expanded from an infinitesimal beginning.

A requirement for my engineering degree was writing a paper in a literature class that proved my writing proficiency. You’re probably not surprised that I chose a paper on the unsettled debate of Steady State and Big Bang theories. Fortunately, I passed. I don’t have a copy of that paper, and I don’t even remember the title. Today, I wish I remembered exactly what a nineteen-year-old me wrote about that debate. About that time, the discovery of background radio noise everywhere in the heavens eventually convinced astronomers of the merit of the Big Bang theory. The noise was left over embers of the Big Bang.

Something from nothing, a creation, was difficult for some astronomers to accept. Einstein said a beginning is “irritating.” The astronomer Robert Jastrow in his 1992 book God and the Astronomers wrote: “…the scientist who…has scaled the mountains of ignorance…and has pulled himself over the final rock…is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Today, the doozie of a mystery is dark matter. This mystery has its beginnings in the same period as the Steady State / Big Bang debate. However, the dark matter mystery remains far from solved. Billions of dollars, euro, and yuan are poured into solving this mystery. Both astronomers and particle physicists are searching for dark matter. The problem is – they don’t know what they’re looking for.

The Moon orbits the Earth, the planets orbit the Sun, and the Sun orbits the Milky Way galaxy. Orbital mechanics is so well understood that mankind has landed probes on the Moon and other planets. The mass of the Sun determines a planet’s orbital speed, and the mass of the Milky Way determines the speed of the Sun around it. When in 1933, the German Fritz Zwicky working in the US discovered galaxies orbit each other too slowly, it didn’t garner much attention. However, astronomer Vera Rubin finally got astronomers attention when she discovered stars orbit too slowly in our neighbor galaxy Andromeda. The accepted explanation: mass exists that we can’t see. The term dark matter arose, and scientists everywhere are looking for it. But, again, they don’t know what it is. To make matters worse; after searching for over 50 years, they haven’t found it. Scientists are getting very nervous. Want more background information? Read my book Astronomy is Heavenly available at the Bookshelf and online.