Dark matter
Dark matter:
Matter that is detected only by its gravitational pull on visible matter. At
least 90%, and possibly 99% of the matter in the universe is dark. The
composition is unknown; it might consist of very low mass stars or supermassive
black holes, but big-bang nucleosynthesis calculations limit the amount of such
baryonic matter to a small fraction of the critical mass density. If the mass
density is critical, as predicted by the simplest versions of inflation, then
the bulk of the dark matter must be a gas of weakly interacting non-baryonic
particles, sometimes called WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).
Various extensions of the standard model of particle physics suggest specific
candidates for the WIMPs.
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