Dark Matter vs. Dark Energy | How the Universe Works | Science Channel

Across the Universe and endless war rages a bitter struggle between invisible forces we've seen this Cosmic battle go on for the past 14 billion years like two navies biting it out in the ocean of SpaceTime dark matter and dark energy battling for control of the universe they've shaped the entire history of the universe they're not about to stop now shadowy forces dictating our past our present and our future the Dark Universe is kind of a puppet master behind the scenes guiding the universe that we can see it's taken over the universe and eventually it may

well destroy the universe as we look out Across the Universe we see nebulas stars and planets all constructed from visible matter but what we see is just a small part of the cosmos the rest is invisible unknown the Dark Universe Dark Universe is a very common phrase to describe our universe because it turns out most of our Cosmos is dark dark not as in night dark as in doesn't interact with light and dark as in we don't really understand it all the objects in our daily experience our bodies the air the chair that you're sitting

in the planets and stars all of that only adds up to 5% of the universe it's the other 95% that is the dark stuff the Dark [Music] Universe the Dark Universe is made of two forces dark matter and dark energy in a way the dark matter and dark energy sort of oppose each other dark matter has positive gravity that pulls things together and dark energy has repulsive gravity that pushes things apart to encapsulate that in one sentence dark matter is attractive dark energy is repulsive since the dawn of time two forces slugging it out for

control of the universe dark matter and dark energy are are locked in this epic struggle the dark matter is trying to bring things together the dark energy is trying to drive everything apart so it's basically a battle who's going to win it's a struggle that started 13.8 billion years ago in the cosmic furnace of the Big Bang the infant Universe was a super hot ball of intense radiation but suddenly it started to transform it cooled and expanded triggering the birth of the regular universe and the Dark Universe scientists believe that both dark matter and dark

energy formed in the first moments of the Big Bang it would have formed probably just fractions of a second after the big bang around the time that normal matter formed and the processes that created the normal matter we know all about similar processes probably created the Dark Matter during these first micro the universe was a hot dense ball of matter and energy they're two sides of the same coin matter can convert into energy and energy can convert directly into matter visible particles of regular matter forming atoms planets stars and Us and other particles they are

invisible they are dark matter one of the big Mysteries that we as astronomers have to solve is what this dark matter is we just don't know the idea of a type of matter that you can't see and that acts differently than normal matter is sort of out there it's sort of weird but the Dark Universe does leave Clues it's like a crime scene you know that a crime has been committed even though you don't know the perpetrator yet we see the hints we see the signs we see the signals that something funny is happening in

our universe even though we don't know exactly what's causing it there are several contenders for what Dark Matter could be it could be normal matter that we just don't see or it could be some sort of exotic matter a particle of some sort that we haven't detected yet it could be a species of particle like an electron like a proton like a Quark but a special kind that doesn't interact with light one of the favorite possible models of dark matter are wimps weakly interacting massive particles wimps may not interact strongly with other matter or light

but they do exert a gravitational pull so they're the best candidates for the particles of dark matter that formed in the Big Bang the early Universe was intensely hot and dense full of new particles of both visible matter and invisible dark matter but another force was present Dark Energy dark energy has existed since the time of the Big Bang Dark Energy was always there we don't know how much of it there was but it's possible that the same amount of dark energy was always there our understanding of what that dark energy is is very limited

if you were to ask a room full of 10 theoretical physicists on the nature of dark energy you'd get about 12 different answers we're not sure what dark energy is um dark energy is just a fancy name for our ignorance dark energy is nothing more than a placeholder name for this enormous Gap in our understanding of how the cosmos works but we don't understand it at all that's true one potential answer to what Dark Energy actually is may be found in so-called empty space could this be the source of dark energy we used to think

of space as just boring emptiness but now I think it's healthier to think of space as a kind of substance a substance that carries a strange type of energy every small region of space has a little bit of energy in it just associated with the vacuum itself vacuum energy is the idea that vacuum isn't empty that there's something there there's an energy in it with a kind of anti-gravity perhaps this vacuum energy that pushes Against Gravity is the mysterious Dark Energy we simply don't know we're not sure that the dark energy is the vacuum energy

it could be a new type of energy that permeates all of space this is what we're trying to measure now dark energy and dark matter forged in the intense heat of the Big Bang opposing forces one attractive one repulsive but together over 13.8 billion years they will shape the history of the universe