Dark Matter Isn’t Breaking the Rules, Scientists Find

Dark matter is still one of the biggest puzzles in modern physics. It makes up around 85% of all the matter in the universe, but no one’s directly observed it yet. It doesn’t absorb or emit light, so we only know it’s there because of its gravity. The latest findings suggest that even this mysterious stuff obeys the same gravitational laws as regular matter.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, took a pretty unique approach.Researchers used massive objects in space that warp space-time with their gravity. This creates what are called gravity wells, and ordinary matter falls into them, just like Einstein’s equations predict. Scientists wanted to know if the same thing happens in galaxies, wich we think are mostly made of dark matter.

Dark Matter Plays by the Rules

A team from the University of Geneva and the University of Portsmouth gathered a ton of data from sources like the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and 22 spectroscopic measurements. Then, they analyzed huge datasets of galaxy redshifts – that’s changes in their spectrum caused by movement in the expanding universe.

Using a complicated mathematical model, they compared these measured velocities with how deep the gravity wells are where the galaxies are located. They wanted to mathematically prove whether the galaxies’ movement matched Euler’s equations and general relativity.

The results are clear: dark matter falls into gravitational wells just as predictably as stars or planets. Basically,it follows Einstein’s general theory of relativity and Euler’s equations,which describe how matter behaves in gravity.