I Am The Glitter In The Glue. Koo Koo Katchoo.

Last week they confirmed the existence of Dark Matter! So it is official: You and I and everything that is made of ordinary matter are the glitter in the glue that binds the universe together. Without Dark Matter, which comprises about %25 of the total energy of the universe, our Galaxies, suns and planets would never have been able to congeal long enough to cool down and allow worms, religious fundamentalists, and humans to exist. Ordinary matter, which fundies need in order to bash their beliefs into other people's brains, comprises only about %5 of the total energy of the universe. In other words, you need the extra gravity which Dark Matter provides in order to keep the matter with which we are more familiar orbiting itself, from galaxies in a super-cluster (though I'm not sure that what they are actually doing can be called orbiting... they are condensed into superstructure filaments, however), suns orbiting the galactic center in a whirlpool spiral, to our 4 inner rocky, 4 gas, and 3 dwarf planets orbiting Sol. Previously, there were scientists who tried to explain the fact that matter wasn't flying about all willy-nilly in the universe by questioning their current understanding of gravity, and getting all crazy and trying to prove that gravity was a different animal on larger cosmic scales than it is here in the tiny now. Well, that's done with, for the moment. Of course, there is still that pesky other %70 of the energy of the universe out there milling about all unlabelled... It's been catalogued as Dark Energy at the moment, but they still have to find some direct evidence of it. Maybe when they find some, they could call it 'The Force'. That would be sweet.
Yeah, I know. I seem to be getting a bit off topic, lately. After all, all I really know about real science is what Carl Sagan taught me. You know, the popular stuff. I've been sitting here for months, feeling pretty accomplished because I was stupid enough to spend three years of my life somewhere I don't belong and making local friends and broadening my horizons, and shrinking the world around me. But when I wind up on a real science blog, and then start following links around and find this whole ring of them, it makes me feel lost in a big universe again and now I want to go back to school and learn what they know so that I can really understand what's going on around me. I've actually been wanting to write about Dark Matter all week, but couldn't figure out a way to make it fit in with the rest of the posts on my playground. Finally, I realized that Dark Matter concerns us all, and I need no excuse to go all rapturous on it.
So okay, what is Dark Matter? Well, it's not just gas and rocks that don't reflect light, and it's not a soul-sucking gob of energy like a Black Hole... it's not even quite the same as Anti-Matter, apparently. It's just kind of there, and somewhat out of phase with our matter. They proved it's existence simply by observing the aftermath of colliding Galaxy clusters... the Dark Matter acted rather like the Queen of England... gliding unaffected and unseeing through the cacophony of the masses of common matter with a fake smile and little wave, yet all eyes watch her depart. If you were watching this scene from two thousand feet above, you would know she was there by watching the masses move around her, not by being able to actually see her.
Of course, none of this yet explains what Dark Matter is... That's because they still haven't reached up and grabbed any so far. It's been observed indirectly, and they've proven it's effect on matter, which is gravitational only, but they haven't got a handful of it yet. So the poets and the fundies are still free to dream, theorize, and demonize, but science marches on! The world is round, my friends, and we are of it, not the rightful masters of it. We are not at the center of anything, except ourselves, and the more we understand about nature, the more mankind's preconceived notions shrink into the background cosmic noise.