Dark Matter and Energy Mystery

As most of you know, astronomers and physicists believe that the matter that we see out in the universe, including us, only makes up 5% of the universe. Dark matter has been proposed to explain the effects of gravity that keeps galaxies together and makes up 27% of the universe. Dark energy has been proposed to explain why the universe it expanding. It makes up the rest the universe's stuff. The only problem with this is that the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy have not been found. This has led to a number of theories that explain what's happening without dark matter or dark energy.

An astronomer by the name of Andre Maeder at the University of Geneva, Switzerland has recently proposed one of these theories. His theory involves the idea of scale invariance of empty space. This idea says that space itself and its properties do not change following dilatation or contraction. Maeder claims that this concept has been ignored when cosmologists proposed the Big Bang Theory, that it was ignored in the attempt to explain electromagnetism and other ideas about empty space.

Einstein tried to get around this problem by inserting a cosmological constant into his equations of General Relativity. The constant was supposed to be a measure of vacuum energy, but really was nothing more than a fudge factor. Maeder, on the other hand, thinks that his theory explains the expansion of the universe without invoking the idea of dark energy.

Using a slightly modified version of Newton's laws, Maeder applied his idea of scale invariance to three difficult to explain astronomy observations: the high speeds that galaxy clusters move; the high speeds of stars in the outer regions of galaxies; and the dispersion of the speeds of stars oscillating around the Milky Way's plane. In all three cases he was able to come up with math to explain these observations without invoking dark matter or dark energy.

My take on this is that it will cause a good deal of controversy among the scientific community. It needs proof to become a valid theory.

Thanks for reading.