Our universe is filled with mysterious objects and occurrences that have baffled man since
the Dawn of time to this day, scientists are scratching their heads over some questions
about our universe.
To get you thinking, here are the top 10 unsolved mystery of the universe.
Number 10: The Multiverse.
The idea of a multiverse has long been debated in physics, but also in other fields, such
as philosophy, astronomy and psychology, essentially the multi-verse theory states that aside from
the universe we are currently in there exists countless other universes that differ from
ours to varying degree, there are lots of variations this theory, but the one that is
most accepted is the many worlds theory.
What it says is, that everything that is a possible outcome happens in another universe.
This means that for example, a simple choice of drinking tea in the morning creates another
universe where you decided not to, combined with the butterfly effect.
This would lead to some universities where even the laws of physics would seem to have
come from the mind of a madman.
While this theory is subject to many heated debates, there has been no evidence to prove
or disprove it until the day comes that scientists find evidence of other universities.
This theory will be used to create wanders of science fiction, as it has for years.
Number 9: Dark matter.
Sounding like some super villains’ secret weapon, dark matter refers to a type of matter
that takes up 84.5% of mass.
In the observable universe dark matter cannot interact nor can it emit electromagnetic radiation.
Which essentially makes it invisible to us, but it has been documented thanks to its properties
that's caused various gravitational distortions.
What's mysterious is that we still do not understand how it came to be, meaning that
there might be some unknown forces presence in the universe that we have yet to discover.
Number 8: White Holes.
These are hypothetical regions of space time, which cannot be entered from the outside,
but matter in light can escape from within it, meaning that they are essentially reversed
black holes.
In theory, white holes would essentially be a gravitational field that has zero mass,
meaning that a white hole would constantly pull an object towards its center, but the
object would never reach it.
White holes were first introduced by mathematicians, that were simply having fun and decided to
see, what a black hole would be like if you took away all of the mass.
Now they are subject to a lot of research and they might be able to explain how the
big bang occurred, since at the beginning or the matter created had to come from somewhere
but until this theory is actually proven.
White holes were simply remaining the topic of speech at mathematician parties.
Number 7: Dark Energy.
Dark energy is an unknown form of energy that is hypothesized to exist all throughout space
and is responsible for the acceleration of the universe expansion, assuming that the
standard model of cosmology is correct.
Dark energy is said to contribute to 68.3% of the total energy present in the observable
universe.
There are several possible explanations for the existence of dark energy, but the most
common one states that, it is just simply needed called the cosmological constant.
The theory states that dark energy is simply the cost of having space, meaning that the
sheer volume of space has to have some fundamental energy.
The main characteristic of dark energy is that it has a strong negative pressure, meaning
it attacks repulsively, which is why it is causing the acceleration of the universe’s
expansion.
Scientists still struggle to explain the complete nature of dark energy, but when they do! that
knowledge will provide us with the deepest understanding of the universe to date.
Number 6: Missing Baryons.
When settling down to calculate the composition of our little universe, scientists put their
heads together and combined all of the dark matter and dark energy, and they got 95% of
the total composition.
The remaining detectable baryonic matter, only comes up to about 2.5% leaving 2.5% of
baryonic matter.
Unaccounted for the leading theory that might actually find out where all the baryons went,
focuses on analysing the halo around our galaxy, scientists have detected a lot of oxygen atoms
that have lost most of their electrons in our galaxies halo, which are located in a
gas that is millions of degrees hot, which has four hotter than the surface of the sun.
But since the oxygen atoms are too far away, we cannot make a correct estimate on the size
of the area that this gas inhabits.
Number 5: The Fermi paradox.
This refers to a contradiction between the lack of evidence and the high probability
of the existence of alien life.
It is estimated that there should be between 1000 and a hundred million civilizations in
our galaxy alone.
But for some reason we have not found them yet.
The paradox has spawned a large number of theories as to why no alien life has been
found.
One such theory states that there exists a great barrier that prevents the species from
evolving past it.
Now this would make the discovery of microbial life.
For example, a scary thought since it would mean that the great barrier of evolution is
not at that point, but rather at some other stage, this would mean that the great barrier
that stops the civilization in its tracks is ahead of us and we might not survive.
Apart from the great barrier theory, there are theories that speak of ideas that are
present in the dreams of Sci-Fi book writers.
There is a theory that earth itself is deliberately isolated and placed in something akin to a
space suit where other intelligent races monitor our every move.
There exists so many theories on this subject.
Yet we still have not found anything conclusive.
Who knows?
Maybe we are alone after all.
Number 4: Why is there more anti-matter than matter?
This question refers to an old problem in physics called the barrier a symmetry problem.
The problem came to be because there is an imbalance in the number of matter and anti-matter
in the observable universe that cannot be explained by the standard mode of particle
physics nor using general relativity.
Scientists are scratching their heads, because in order to find an explanation they would
have to modify the standard model of physics to fit the current observations.
However, there is one theory that sadly cannot be proven today, that states that current
parts of the universe simply have a larger quantity of anti-matter and other parts have
more matter.
This theory would imply that anti-matter repels regular matter, but sadly, this would contradict
general relativity, meaning that we would have to change our understanding of the universe
in order to prove this theory.
To this day, there is no one agreed upon theory as to why they say symmetry of matter and
anti-matter is present.
Number 3: Universe Reionization.
The Reionization of the universe refers to the time period when all of the gas in the
universe became ionized, meaning that their molecular structure changed with the removal
of one or more electrons.
It was one of the most important changes in the universe, since during this period, the
first radiating objects appeared, this period is actually responsible for the universe as
we see it today.
Since before this epoch, the universe was in the so-called dark ages.
Understanding something that happened this long ago in the universe past is very complicated
and requires a lot of careful studying and planning.
But there is currently a large amount of effort dedicated to understanding how this period
started with objects like quasars being used to look back into the universe has past and
see how it all looked like before.
But until we make new advances in physics and engineering, allowing us to pair into
the past of our universe.
We will not know what's ended the dark ages and cause the first stars to be born.
Number 2: Fermi Bubbles.
These were first discovered in 2010 and are two large bubbles invisible to the human eye,
located above and below the centre of our galaxy.
Scientists have only recently been able to discover the exact origin of this bubbles
and it seems like there are two large jets coming from the center of our galaxy dispersing
matter and light outwards.
There are currently two theories that try to explain this phenomenon.
One says that the matter being thrown out from the center is caused by a massive increase
in star birth at the centre of our galaxy, which would cause a lot of matter to be present
at the centre.
Another theory states that the massive jet that sprays matter is coming from a supermassive
black hole located in the center of our galaxy.
Black holes are known to eject matter and the black hole that is in the center of our
galaxy would have the right mass to produce objects to the size of Fermi Bubbles.
In any case, we still have much research to do, since the events that created these objects
took place almost 20 million years ago.
Number 1: The End Of The Universe.
The ultimate fate of our universe is something long debated and because of that there are
lots of different theories, about how our universe will end.
The main theory used to study the possible fate of our universe, is Einstein's theory
of general relativity.
Since every possible solution to its equation implies that there exists an ultimate fate
of the universe and there is no good outcome.
There exist two leading theories about the university's end, the big crunch, which is
basically the opposite of the big bang.
And it says that the universe will ultimately stop expanding due to gravity and start to
implode thus ending the universe.
Another theory, which is actually the most probable one is called the heat death of the
universe.
It implies that the universe will continue expanding at an exponential rate and all of
the galaxies will at one point be so far away from each other, that there will be no light
in the sky anymore.
After this matter will be evenly distributed and the stars will not form anymore.
And thus, everything will end.
Look on the bright side though!
None of us will be alive to see these events.
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