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In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation.Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be observed.
The density of dark matter in an expanding universe decreases more quickly than dark energy, and eventually the dark energy dominates. Specifically, when the volume of the universe doubles, the density of dark matter is halved, but the density of dark energy is nearly unchanged (it is exactly constant in the case of a cosmological constant).
Unlike dark matter, ordinary matter can lose energy by many routes, which means that as it collapses, it can lose the energy which would otherwise hold it apart, and collapse more quickly, and into denser forms. Ordinary matter gathers where dark matter is denser, and in those places it collapses into clouds of mainly hydrogen gas.
As "dark matter", baryonic dark matter is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but its presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. This form of dark matter is composed of "baryons", heavy subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons and combinations of these, including non-emitting ordinary atoms.
Based on the 2013 data, the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. On 5 February 2015, new data was released by the Planck mission, according to which the age of the universe is 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years old and the Hubble constant was measured to be 67.74 ± 0.46 (km/s)/Mpc .
Shortly after recombination, the photon mean free path became larger than the Hubble length, and photons traveled freely without interacting with matter. [16] For this reason, recombination is closely associated with the last scattering surface, which is the name for the last time at which the photons in the cosmic microwave background ...
Direct detection of dark matter is the science of attempting to directly measure dark matter collisions in Earth-based experiments. Modern astrophysical measurements, such as from the cosmic microwave background , strongly indicate that 85% of the matter content of the universe is unaccounted for. [ 1 ]
In physical cosmology, the photon epoch was the period in the evolution of the early universe in which photons dominated the energy of the universe. The photon epoch started after most leptons and anti-leptons were annihilated at the end of the lepton epoch, about 10 seconds after the Big Bang. [1]