Image Credit: Spacedotcom
"Dark matter is thought to be all around us, yet scientists can't see it, touch it, or even figure out what it is.
"Now four astronomers who helped befuddle the world by discovering evidence for dark matter have won a prestigious cosmology prize. Scientists infer the existence of dark matter by its gravitational influence on the regular, visible matter around it.
"The scientists will share the $500,000 purse that comes with the 2011 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation.
"The winners are: University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Marc Davis; George Efstathiou, the director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge, England; Carlos Frenk, the director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University in England; and Simon White, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany."
Dark Matter is a grail search for the universe's missing mass, that should be there, but like the Cheshire Cat, is not.
One of the effects and evidence of dark matter is a phenomena called gravitational lensing, where light is bent from a straight line path (to our telescopes/eyes) by the pull of gravity: you need mass, seen and unseen for that.
The link to the full article is below.
Space.com article: Astronomers Nab $500,000 Prize for Hunting Elusive Dark Matter
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