Existence of Dark Matter?

Elusive celestial energy which was thought to make up 68% of Universe, is now claimed to cover only 27% raising doubts over its presence

The elusive dark energy, thought to make up 68 per cent of the universe, may not exist at all, scientists have claimed. They believe that standard models of the universe fail to take account of its changing structure, but that once this is done the need for dark energy disappears.

From the 1920s, mapping the velocities of galaxies led scientists to conclude that the whole universe is expanding, and that it began life as a vanishingly small point.

Dark matter is now thought to make up 27 per cent of the content of universe (in contrast ‘ordinary’ matter amounts to only five per cent). Observations of the explosions of white dwarf stars in binary systems in the 1990s led scientists to the conclusion that a third component, dark energy, made up 68 per cent of the cosmos, and is responsible for driving an acceleration in the expansion of the universe.

In the new work, PhD student Gabor Racz of Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, question the existence of dark energy and suggest an alternative explanation.

They argue that conventional models of cosmology (the study of the origin and evolution of the universe), rely on approximations that ignore its structure, and where matter is assumed to have a uniform density. The insides of the bubbles are in contrast almost empty of both kinds of matter. Using a computer simulation to model the effect of gravity on the distribution of millions of particles of dark matter, scientists reconstructed the evolution of the universe.