There’s a search going on that started at the beginning of the 70’s, when observations revealed that something wasn’t quite right with the universe – part of it was missing! 

The reason that we know it’s there is because of its effect on what we can actually see. To start with the stars at the edge of galaxies are moving to fast, there seems to be extra stuff exerting an influence. This stuff might be invisible but we know it's there. If it wasn’t there there wouldn’t be enough gravity to hold the stars together and everything would fly apart and chaos on a galactic scale would ensue.

Another piece of smoking gun evidence, is an optical effect observed around some distant galaxies. When the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed towards the massive Abell Cluster 2218, the gravity pull around it was so great it actually bent light around it, turning the whole region into something known as a gravitational lens. Using this technique Hubble was actually able to see through it, regions at the very edge of the universe. It took some amazing images such as the one above, stuffed full of galaxies. However, once various measurements were taken, it was soon realised that the light was being bent too much. In other words the combined mass was greater than anything that we could measure, meaning a lot of the mass was invisible. As far as dark matter is concerned we believe to be around 25 percent of the mass of the universe.

So what could dark matter be? The best guess is that it’s some sort of exotic hidden particles we are yet to discover. 

But this isn’t all that’s missing. There’s another 70 percent lost back down the back of the galactic sofa and we have labelled this dark energy. We have even less idea about what this could be. We are just starting to understand that space isn’t nothing, but is instead a rich area stuffed full of dark energy, whatever it might be.

So if you do the sums, that means there’s 5 percent that we can see and currently understand. That’s the observable universe today. So when you see those Hubble images, etc, we really are just seeing the peek of a very big iceberg, the rest floating beneath the visible waterline.

The below YouTube video provides a very neat overview of all this missing stuff.

Out there in the space as they say, no one can hear you scream... and that will be because of the vacuum. However, radio waves can happily pass through that medium and radiate out across the galaxy. 

If you’ve ever seen static on a TV screen did you know that you’re actually tuning into the white noise of the universe, the static that fills the radio waves between our broadcasts. Listen to the pops and whistles from the audio output of a radio telescope and you may hear Jupiter and its moons, our sun's wail, the distant clicking of pulsars, and even the echo of the big bang itself.

Inspired by this, I’ve assembled a little YouTube celestial orchestra for you to listen to. The gas planets are majestic and Earth sounds truly unique buzzing with the sound of life. And further, much further away, you can listen to the clicking of the spinning pulsar at the heart of Vega. These are just a selection of the haunting sounds that fill the universe around us.

One second after the big bang a particle was created and has been playing a game of hide and seek ever since. The reason we know it should exist is that there’s a piece missing from our jigsaw for the Standard Model of physics – the Higgs boson particle. Now a lot of people are very fond of our Standard Model and a jigsaw just doesn’t look complete if there’s a big glaring hole in it. So ever since the idea was first suggested, the search has been on for the elusive God Particle. 

The theory, which has been around for fifty years, states that moments after the big bang the Higgs boson field and its associated particle were created, but until now we’ve found no direct evidence. That’s all changed in 2011 when news from the Large Hadrian Collider (LHC), where we can recreate those early conditions of our universe, hinted at its detection.

Without Higgs boson in the Standard Model there would be no life... symmetry would rule, a desire for order you see reflected in the perfect structures of snowflakes. But without something to give particles mass and slow them down, the Higgs boson field, our celestial treacle if you will, things would be very, very different. All particles would have flown apart at the speed of light from the big bang and without the clumping of interstellar gasses and the consequent formation of stars, then there would be no planets and certainly no life. This is the paradox at the heart of modern physics and is why so many scientists have been spent so much time and energy looking for it.

This year could be the most exciting moment in physics since Einstein revealed his theory of relativity. Certainly I’m sure for many of those involved in theoretical physics, they’ll remember exactly when they were if they hear the news confirming the existence of the Higgs boson particle later this year. 

In the TED video above, George Smoot talks about the design of the universe. What becomes clear is that for all the appearance of randomness from our perspective here on Earth, when computer modelling is thrown into the mix, an underlying order is quickly revealed. 


This is particularly clearly illustrated by Smoot's image of dark matter. This is the hidden ingredient in the cake recipe for the universe. We know this "thing" exists and can indeed see its effect around distant galaxies where light is bent around their edges (forming a gravitational lens to view even more distant galaxies). There is not enough matter in a galaxy to bend light as much as observed, and we’ve labelled this missing mass dark matter.

The mapped image of dark matter is breathtaking. It shows that the design for the universe is far from chaotic and has a very ordered underlying filament-like structure. This is a recurring fractal pattern seen in nature, from the branches of a tree, to the bronchioles of lungs. However, to see this in our universe you need to zoom right out. Quantum physics deals with the very small. The scale we're talking here is exactly the opposite, the physics of the very, very large. When you consider the measurements that George Smoot is talking about, the scale of the universe alone is jaw-dropping. Each tiny node in his image are entire galaxies (there hundreds of billions in our universe).

It seems that the data is telling us that the empty stuff out there, the void between galaxies is filled with order. I personally find that an inspiring thought.