Dark Matter and Dark Energy One and the Same?

Either it is exerting an extra gravitational pull on the galaxies or is driving the expansion of the universe, dark matter and dark energy remain mostly mysterious even today. Astrophysicists say that the matter distribution in the universe points towards a concentration of 4 percent of regular matter while the remnant mass is represented by dark matter and dark energy. On the other hand, astronomers from the University of St Andrews suggest that dark matter and dark energy are, in fact, more closely related to each other that previously thought, and the model of the universe could be greatly simplified by revealing the basic constituents of the two forms of energy.

Observations on the visible matter in the galaxies, regular matter that emits or is shined by light, show that there is not enough mass in the universe to explain the produced gravitational force. This observation has been first made in the early 1930s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky who proposed that the extra gravitational force is produced by a massive amount of unseen matter, what we currently refer to as dark matter.

Dr HongSheng Zhao, from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy believes that we have been observing the presence of dark energy through dark matter ever since, with one condition though, if we accept the fact that dark energy is one of the forms of dark matter manifestation. They both have the same origin in the form of what Dr Zhao calls 'dark fluid', thus, on the scale of the galaxies, dark fluid experiences material-like behavior, while on the large scale of the universe, dark fluid is represented in the form of dark energy that is powering the inflation.

One of the most important details in Dr Zhao's work is the fact that his cosmological model of the universe fits perfectly in the 3:1 ratio between the concentration of dark energy and dark matter predicted by cosmological observations. We now currently have relatively accurate models of the cosmological side of the universe, albeit we barely know what dark matter is, or whether it is indeed responsible for the observed effects.

Particle physics proposes a wide variety of dark matter candidates, all the way from the neutrino to very massive particles that have not been discovered yet. Dr Zhao believes that the upcoming experiments in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator would be unable to detect them because his model predicts that dark matter particles have extremely low energy, while the LHC works with highly energetic particles.

On the other hand, we might be looking for something which doesn't even exist. The model proposed by Dr Zhao, however, doesn't necessarily require a modification in the energy of the dark matter particles, but in the dark matter component of gravity. This wouldn't be the first time such modifications are operated. For example, when Newton wrote the theory of physics of gravity, he proposed that gravity is an instantaneous force, but Einstein limited the speed of gravity to that of light, in 1905, with the publishing of the Theory of Relativity.

Einstein could never set his mind whether the equation of the Theory of Relativity should contain so-called omnipresent constant sources, or dark energy. Fred Zwickly further extended the work and added to the equations a type of non-light emitting matter, or dark energy, but, except the discovery of the neutrino, there are no evidence that dark sources even exist.