SKS Education

                                                             DARK MATTER BY-SANKET KUMAR SAHU BRAHMAPUR,ODISHA Dark matter , a component of the   universe   whose presence is discerned from its   gravitational   attraction rather than its luminosity. Dark matter makes up 30.1 percent of the   matter -energy   composition   of the universe; the rest is   dark energy   (69.4 percent) and “ordinary” visible matter (0.5 percent). Originally known as the “missing mass,” dark matter’s existence was first inferred by Swiss American astronomer   Fritz Zwicky , who in 1933 discovered that the mass of all the   stars   in the   Coma cluster of   galaxies   provided only about 1 percent of the mass needed to keep the galaxies from escaping the cluster’s gravitational pull. The reality of this missing mass remained in question for decades, until the 1970s when American astronomers   Vera Rubin   and   W. Kent Ford confirmed its existence by the observation of a similar phenomenon: