What We Can't See: Chasing the Universe's Missing Ninety-Five Percent

you know the fireflies are just about done for the season it gets so dark out here in the holler when they're gone makes you think about all the all the stuff you can't see hey love got me brew cats on me lap what's on your mind tonight not another one of your spooky stories i hope well depends on what you call spooky here's a number for you 95% that's how much of the whole universe is well missing we can't see it can't touch it he's just gone 95 oh come on earl you're having me on swire on my tackle box last week we were talking about the mystery of where life started all tiny and

complicated this is the other end of the telescope it's the biggest thing there is and most of it is a ghost hold on chuck how can you know something's there if it's missing sounds like my grandkids tried to explain where the last biscuit went that's a beautiful part of it see they call the first part dark matter and we know it's there the way you know the wind is there you can't see the wind but you see the leaves dancing don't you mhmm i'm with you so far well astronomers look out at these big galaxies these beautiful spinning wheels of stars

and they're spinning way too fast the stars on the outside are moving so quick they ought to just fly off into space but they don't something's holding them some invisible gravity so there's something heavy we can't see holding it all together like a big rubber band exactly and they see it other ways too the new james webb space telescope found this big old cluster of galaxies xlssc one twenty two the gravity from all that dark matter is so strong it bends the light from things behind it i like looking through the bottom of an old glass bottle this fella kyle finner he said that in this cluster you can see this faint glow from lost

stars and that glow traces the dark matter perfectly oh so it's like a dusty footprint of a ghost that's that's a bit clever ain't it so that's the 27% what's the rest of the missing stuff oh boy now that's the other mystery they call it dark energy and if dark matter is the glue holding things together dark energy is the thing pushing everything apart and it's getting faster wait so one's pulling and one's pushing in the same universe that sounds like a right muddle it is and the numbers don't make a leak of sense our best theories about how much of this dark energy there ought to be are wrong by a 120 orders of magnitude that's a one with a 120 zeros

after it that's not just wrong girl that's that's not even in the right spot i tell you what there's a scientist jessica muir who said it plain it's not very satisfying that we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of you'll feel the frustration can't you i can it feels like you've got a house you know it's got foundations and walls but you can't find them you're just living in the wallpaper that's it exactly and you know some folks are starting to ask what if we're just looking at it wrong this professor david wiltshire he reckons that maybe we don't need dark energy at all oh how's that then he says the

universe ain't smooth like we pretend in the math it's lumpy and in einstein's world time can run at different speeds and different places he thinks if you account for all that lumpiness the pushing apart effect just appears it's a trick of the light sorta an illusion so you're telling me after all that there might be no there at all just bad maths maybe and see that's what i love about it is it a ghost we can't catch a force we don't understand or are we just looking through the wrong end of the telescope entirely the question is just so much bigger than any answer we got right now it make you feel rightly small but

in a good way you know i do love it's a big old sky out there right then you have a good night till i'm off to dream of wobbly universes night night sleep tight chuck night now bridget well that is about the size of it