dark matter

Meaning

Noun

• Particles of matter that cannot be detected by their radiation but whose presence is inferred from gravitational effects.
• By restriction, particles that have mass, which does not readily interact with normal matter except through gravitational effects.

Origin

• , from dunkel and Materie. Coined by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in German in 1933, to account for the apparent mass needed to account for galaxy clusters, where the mass of luminous matter did not add up to enough of a gravitational effect, inferring nonluminous matter must exist to account for the missing mass. The term gained new popularity due to the missing mass found in galaxies to account for galaxy rotation curves discovered by Vera Rubin in research published in English in the 1970s.