Existence And Nature Of Dark Matter In The Universe
1987; Annual Reviews; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1146/annurev.astro.25.1.425
ISSN1545-4282
Autores Tópico(s)Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
ResumoAnn. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 1987. 25: 425-72 Copyright © 1987 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF DARK MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE Virginia T rimble Astronomy Program, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, and Department of Physics, University of California, Irvine, California 92717 1. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION AND THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM The first detection of nonluminous matter from its gravitational effects occurred in 1844, when Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel announced that several decades of positional measurements of Sirius and Procyon implied that each was in orbit with an invisible companion of mass comparable to its own. The companions ceased to be invisible in 1862, when Alvan G. Clark turned his newly-ground 18%” objective toward Sirius and resolved the 10q‘ of the photons from the system emitted by the white dwarf Sirius B. Studies of astrometric and single-line spectroscopic binaries are the modern descendants of Bessel’s work. A couple of generations later, data implying nonluminous matter on two very different scales surfaced almost simultaneously. First, Oort (498, 499) analyzed numbers and velocities of stars near the Sun and concluded that visible stars fell shy by 30-50% of adding up to the amount of gravitating matter implied by the velocities. Then, in 1933, Zwicky (777) concluded that the velocity dispersions in rich clusters of galaxies required 10 to 100 times more mass to keep them bound than could be accounted for by the luminous galaxies themselves. The former result was taken much more seriously than the latter by contemporary and succeeding astronomers (being dignified by the name “the Oort limit”), which is perhaps more a statement about the personalities of Oort and Zwicky than about anything else. 425 0066-4146/87/0915—0425$02.00 © Annual Reviews Inc. - Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System
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