DARK MATTER, DARK ENERGY – DARK SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE

TTC VIDEO NOTES, Sean Carroll, Ph.D.

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01 BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE UNIVERSE

Ingredients of which the universe us made

Dark Matter and Dark Energy – something that haven’t

been detected directly; but we have evidence for
believing them.

Understanding of Dark Matter and Dark Energy – from

observation to interpretation using the concept of
Newton’s gravity.

It’s possible that the inferences used – from observation

to the existence of dark matter and dark energy – have
gone wrong along the way; not a mistake in gathering
observational data but rather in the interpretation of
observational data; our understanding of gravity may be
wrong.

We know – universe is about 14 billion years old.

We believe – that 95% of the universe is a dark sector

(we are not absolutely sure because there are some
interesting alternatives but that is the theory that fits the
data by far the best).

We speculate – what is dark matter, dark energy? What

are they made of? Where do they come from? Why do
they have the amounts that they do? We’ll be making
hypotheses and figure out which of those is true – but
we don’t know yet.

A question since ancient times – what is the universe

fundamentally made of? Elementary constituent of
matter – Earth, Air, Water and Fire in ancient times;
Democritus untl 19th century – atom; Nowadays –
elementary particles.
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theory of general relativity allows the space in between

the objects to grow.

Milky Way – huge collection of stars.

Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite picture of

a milky way.

Can we divide quarks – we don’t know but most believed

that they can’t – electrons and quarks are part of the
This was taken inside the Milky Way.
bottom layer of which ordinary matter is constructed.
Some 100 years ago
Up quarks, down quarks and electrons – you can make
1) it was the common understanding that the Milky
everything you’ve ever seen.
Way is all there is in the universe. “Island Universe”
We know the quarks are there because of experiments idea.
made using particle accelerators. 2) Nebulae – fuzzy little patches on a telescope or on
a photographic plate; they don’t look like stars
What are the heavier particles that we haven’t
discovered? – Problem: It takes more energy to make
heavier particles – There’s a financial limit.

What other ways are there to discover new particles?

Influence of gravity on other celestial objects. These
objects create gravitational fields and if we can detect
these gravitational fields, then it provides as a clue to the
secrets on the dark side of the universe. For example, if
the moon couldn’t be seen, we could detect its presence
through the tides here on earth. The moon’s gravitational
field influences the tides here on earth.

02 SMOOTH, EXPANDING UNIVERSE ORION NEBULA (taken today)

The universe looks the same everywhere.
Balloon analogy of an expanding universe – the idea
works if we think of the dots separating “only” and think
that there’s no such thing as inside or outside of the
balloon.
Orion Nebula - A star forming region. A huge cloud of
gas that is collapsing under its mutual gravitational force
and it will splinter off eventually to form individual stars.
It’s right here in the Milky Way.

Universe expanding – it’s not getting bigger into some

pre-existing space. It means that the individual objects
inside the universe are getting farther apart. – Einstein’s
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noticed that these variable stars, given their periods,

were much dimmer than the Cepheid variable stars in
our galaxy. He worked out how far they were and
discovered that Andromeda was a galaxy all by itself,
comparable in size to the Milky Way.

1 – THE UNIVERSE IS BIG - conclusion

ANDROMEDA NEBULA
100 Years ago, this looks like a fuzzy little patch. The
truth is that this is actually the Andromeda Galaxy.
We live in a universe that is filled with Galaxies.
Edwin Hubble – first figured this out. Looked at things
that looked like nebulae and resolved them into
individual stars; suggested that they are not clouds of
gases but a collection of individual stars all by
themselves.
2 – ITS GETTING BIGGER – also discovered by
Hubble.
Vesto Slipher (1875 – 1969) – first to observe that
galaxies were redshifted, meaning, they are moving
away from us.
Hubble compared the distances to galaxies that he had
measured to the redshift that Slipher had measured and
found that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is
moving away from us.
The space in between all the galaxies are expanding.

Edwin Hubble – measured the distance of Andromeda

Galaxy from earth….using the technique of “standard
candles”

IDEA: Imagine a candle flame a certain distance away

from you with a certain brightness. At twice the distance,
it would be 1/4th dimmer. This is the inverse square law.

The problem is if you don’t know how bright it was to

begin with, you can’t figure out how far away it is.

Problem in astrophysics a hundred years ago and still

today is to find “standard candles” and measure their
distances.

Build a COSMIC DISTANCE LADDER using standard

candles.

Standard candle for Hubble – CEPHEID VARIABLE

STARS. A type of star that pulsates. The standard
candleness is not absolute. Cepheid variables are not all
exactly the same brightness. They also don’t have the
same period of oscillation.

1908 – Henrietta Levitt – discovered that there is a

relationship between how bright a Cepheid variable is
and its period of pulsation.
Hubble discovered Cepheid variable stars in the
Andromeda Galaxy as well as in other galaxies. He
A more modern version of the plot.
Very strong evidence that the universe is expanding.
Does not mean that we are at the center.
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HUBBLE’S EQUATION
v = Hd
H = Hubble’s constant; Hubble parameter
In the past, the universe was expanding much more
quickly. H was a bigger number in the early universe.
Measuring H was difficult.
Wendy Freedman measured it at: 72 km/sec/Mpc
A parsec is about 3.26 light-years
Knowing these data, it becomes easier to map out the
universe.
A plot of where galaxies are in the universe created by
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Each dot in the photo
represents individual galaxies.
We live at the center of this picture; pic is a northern and
a southern hemisphere survey.
1) The universe is basically the same everywhere.
2) It’s not exactly the same.
The expansion of the universe depends on what is inside
(topic of next lecture).
Hubble never said that the universe was expanding. He only
said that distant galaxies are moving at a velocity proportional
to their distances. Never won the Nobel Prize.
03 SPACE, TIME AND GRAVITY
Special Relativity- 1905 – Einstein – a replacement for
Newton’s notion of space and time.
Einstein tried to incorporate gravity into his theory of special
relativity and realized that they are incompatible. He
eventually throws away special relativity and replaces it with
something better - General Relativity
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The very structure of space and time themselves are dynamic;
space-time has a geometry and a curvature, and it’s that
curvature that we interpret as gravity.
Time is like space. The rate at which time flows depends on
what you do. Like measuring distance that varies depending
on the path taken to measure distances.
The amount of time that one measures is not a fact of the
universe. It’s personal. It’s a fact of what you do. It could be
different for two observers – even if they start and end at the
same point.
When a clock moves around, it measures a different amount
of time than when a clock stands still. This becomes more
obvious if one moves at a speed of light.
If everything responds to gravity in the same way, then gravity
is not a force at all. Gravity is a feature of space-time itself – it
is the curvature of space-time. Space-time has a geometry.
If all the numbers would be zero, the geometry would be flat.
Right hand side – energy and momentum of the stuff in the
universe.
Any stuff existing creates a gravitational field.
Space-time is dynamical…it can change.
Apparent velocity vs actual velocity of galaxies.
It’s not that the galaxies are actually moving. It’s the space
between galaxies that is growing; it’s stretching; it’s getting
bigger; more space is coming into existence.
Where did space and time come from? This question doesn’t
make sense for Newton. But with relativity, this question
becomes relevant…but we don’t know yet the answer; but our
understanding of dark matter and energy will be part of the
clues that helps us answer the question eventually.
04 COSMOLOGY IN EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE
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Redshifting observed from distant galaxies is not actually a
Doppler shift; space is actually expanding in between.
How big is the universe? We don’t know how big the universe
is or whether the question makes sense.
What we know is that we don’t see any boundary to the
universe.
Because space-time in Einstein’s universe is dynamical, we
could imagine different kinds of shape.
We don’t have any direct evidence that the universe is finite in
size. (Does not mean that it’s not finite in size).
We only see a finite part of whatever universe there is. For
two reasons:
1) The universe has a finite age. The time between
now and the big bang is very fairly well determined
to be about 14 billion years. Data is telling us that
it’s about 13.7 billion years.
2) Light travels at a finite speed. Light has only
traveled a finite distance from the now until the big
bang. Even if the universe were infinite, we couldn’t
see all of it. We could only see a certain patch, the
patch from which light can get into us in less than 14
billion years.
We do not know the actual size of the universe but we could
determine its relative size; for example, how many years
would it take for the distance (to the galaxies) to grow by 10%,
by half, etc.
Cosmologists invented the SCALE FACTOR OF THE
UNIVERSE – is a number which we set by convention equal
to 1 today. So, if the scale factor is ½, this means that all the
galaxies in the universe were half their current distance.
What we need to understand is what the scale factor is doing
as a function of time.
The rate of expansion in the past is bigger than it is now.
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One of the surprising results of cosmology in the last ten years
is that today, the expansion rate of the universe is going up.
The earth is bound together by the gravitational field of all the
stuff in the earth, likewise for the sun, likewise for the galaxies.
The Milky Way galaxy is bound together by the mutual
gravitational force of all the 100 billion stars in it.
The first crucial thing about the expansion of the universe is
that bound systems do not expand. For example, the distance
between two galaxies is getting bigger but the galaxies
themselves are not getting bigger.
The bound systems do not get stretched along with the
universe.
This is a subtle thing that people are initially reluctant to
believe but it really is true. It’s the only way that you could
make sense of the claim that the universe is expanding. If
everything in the universe, including people and atoms,
expanded along with space, that would exactly be the same
as if nothing is expanding.
When we say that space is expanding, what we mean is, the
number of atoms that it would take to stretch from you to a
distant galaxy is getting bigger. That’s because the atoms are
fixed and the galaxies are moving away.
But while the universe is expanding, even though particles or
atoms do not stretch along with it, they become more dilute.
More and more space is coming into existence.
Things are diluting away as the universe expands.
Matter is anything that gets their energy from their mass.
E = mc2 means that the REST ENERGY of an object, the
energy it has when it’s not moving is mass times the square of
the speed of light. That’s the minimum amount of energy that
something could possibly have. It’s a constant.
This means that the energy per particle is not changing if the
particle is moving slowly compared to the speed of light.
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As opposed to matter, we have radiation, photons, etc., other

particles that are moving at the speed of light.

If you’re moving at the speed of light, your MASS IS ZERO.

Your energy is not coming from e=mc2 but rather it comes
from the frequency at which you’re vibrating. But that
frequency is changing as the universe expands. Because of
this redshift. The cosmological redshift takes short wavelength
high energy photons and stretches them into long
wavelengths low energy photons.

For particles that are moving less than the speed of light,
energy is constant.

For particles moving at a speed of light, the energy per

particle decreases as the universe expands. Particles
traveling at the speed of light / radiation lose their energy as
they become older in the history of the universe.

To a cosmologist, that’s the difference between matter and

radiation. How the energy density changes.

The number density of particles is just how many particles per

cubic centimeter so the energy density is how much energy
per cubic centimeter, In a region that grows along with the
universe, the number density is constant – we’re not creating
new particles. But in a fixed cubic centimeter of space, the
energy density will go down. The number density goes down,
particles become more dilute and therefore the energy density
goes down.

Difference between matter and radiation – the energy density

in radiation goes down more quickly. In radiation, not only do
the particles dilute away, but every particle loses energy.

The total energy in all universe in radiation goes down more

quickly than the total energy in matter. As the universe gets
older and older, matter will eventually win. There will be more
energy density in matter than in radiation.

Contrarywise, in the past, the energy density of matter is less

important than the energy density of radiation. In the past
when all the protons are squeezed together, it’s the photons
that were winning. In the past, the universe was radiation
dominated.

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