Saturday Science: About Those Extra Pounds

The earth may be heavier than we thought, because of dark matter. Maybe.

There may be a giant ring of dark matter invisibly encircling the Earth, increasing its mass and pulling much harder on orbiting satellites than anything invisible should pull, according to preliminary research from a scientist specializing the physics of GPS signaling and satellite engineering.

The dark-matter belt around the Earth could represent the beginning of a radically new understanding of how dark matter works and how it affects the human universe, or it could be something perfectly valid but less exciting despite having been written up by New Scientist and spreading to the rest of the geek universe on the basis of a single oral presentation of preliminary research at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December.

This is all still very iffy -- dark matter as a concept is relatively new, and was actually invented to explain anomalies between the universe's actual rate of expansion against what our calculations show it should be.

Dark matter – invisible and so-far almost undetectable – was invented to try to explain why the universe does seem to be expanding from a single point as Big Bang theory predicts, but not nearly as fast as it should.

Galaxies, stars and other matter should only crawl away from each other at the speeds we see if there were a lot more gravity holding them back than there would be if the matter we could see were all the matter in the universe.

Making the math work – getting it to agree with what the universe had already decided to do – meant bumping up the guesstimated weight of the universe by 80 percent, with nothing to explain what all that mass actually was. Dark matter is widely accepted as real among physicists, but is still more a mystery filler substance than an actual, explainable phenomenon.

The actual numbers are, to a layman, miniscule, but to a physicist, they're significant. As for dark matter itself, it helps if you think of it as loose neutrinos and such that aren't coalescing into anything really detectable (except, as in this case, by inference).

So, if those holiday treats took up residence around your waistline, just blame it on dark matter.

I was going to post a picture to go with this, but the thing is, you can't see the stuff.

Hah! Found one, and another article on dark matter.