How Dark Matter Came to Matter

Abstract

The history of the dark matter problem can be traced back to at least the 1930s, but it was not until the early 1970s that the issue of 'missing matter' was widely recognized as problematic. In the latter period, previously separate issues involving missing mass were brought together in a single anomaly. We argue that reference to a straightforward 'accumulation of evidence' alone is inadequate to comprehend this episode. Rather, the rise of cosmological research, the accompanying renewed interest in the theory of relativity and changes in the manpower division of astronomy in the 1960s are key to understanding how dark matter came to matter. At the same time, this story may also enlighten us on the methodological dimensions of past practices of physics and cosmology.

Accepted for publication in Nature Astronomy. Corrected typo

Cited by in corpus (54)

• Measurement of the permanent electric dipole moment of the neutron
• The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints
• A New Era in the Quest for Dark Matter
• Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter
• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• Effective Fluid Description of the Dark Universe
• Emergence of a Dark Force in Corpuscular Gravity
• Analytical models of supermassive black holes in galaxies surrounded by dark matter halos
• Dynamical effects of the scale invariance of the empty space: The fall of dark matter ?
• Close encounters of the primordial kind: a new observable for primordial black holes as dark matter
• Scalarons mimicking Dark Matter in the Hu-Sawicki model of f(R) gravity
• Measurement of detector-corrected observables sensitive to the anomalous production of events with jets and large missing transverse momentum in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV using the ATLAS detector
• Rotation Curves of Galaxies and Their Dependence on Morphology and Stellar Mass
• The Scale-Invariant Vacuum (SIV) Theory: A Possible Origin of Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Apparent and emergent dark matter around a Schwarzschild black hole
• Methodological Reflections on the MOND/Dark Matter Debate
• Two sides of the same coin: sterile neutrinos and dark radiation. Status and perspectives
• Observational Evidence of Evolving Dark Matter Profiles at $z\le 1$
• Dark Matter Searches with Levitated Sensors
• Searching for Signatures of Dark matter-Dark Radiation Interaction in Observations of Large-scale Structure
• Fast and realistic large-scale structure from machine-learning-augmented random field simulations
• Extended Cosmology in Palatini f(R)-theories
• Galactic rotation dynamics in a new $f(\mathcal{R})$ gravity model
• Deflection angle, quasinormal modes and optical properties of a de Sitter black hole in $f(\mathcal{T},\mathcal{B})$ gravity
• Constraint on the mass of fuzzy dark matter from the rotation curve of the Milky Way
• Vector dark matter in supercooled Higgs portal models
• First Sub-MeV Dark Matter Search with the QROCODILE Experiment Using Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors
• Integrating Dark Matter, Modified Gravity, and the Humanities
• Baryogenesis through Asymmetric Hawking Radiation from Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter
• Covariant Cubic Interacting Vertices for Massless and Massive Integer Higher Spin Fields
• Power spectrum of density fluctuations, halo abundances and clustering with primordial black holes
• Solution of the dark matter riddle within standard model physics: From black holes, galaxies and clusters to cosmology
• Doubly Blind Spots in Scalar Dark Matter Models
• Collisionless shocks in self-interacting dark matter
• Gauge Invariant Lagrangian Formulations for Mixed Symmetry Higher Spin Bosonic Fields in AdS Spaces
• Dark photon production via $\gamma \gamma \to \gamma A^{\prime }$
• Entanglement production in Einstein-Cartan theory
• Parametric-resonance based phenomenology of gravitating axion configurations
• Why did the dark matter hypothesis supersede modified gravity in the 1980s?
• Relativistic structure of a supermassive black hole embedded in the dark matter halo of NGC 4649 (M60)
• Dark matter effect attributed to the inherent structure of cosmic space
• Free-floating "planets'' in the macrolensed quasar Q2237+0305
• Cosmological nanolensing by dense gas clouds
• The density profile of Milky Way dark matter halo constrained from the OGLE microlensing sky map
• Long term operation with the DarkSide-50 detector
• A generalized Higgs potential with two degenerate minima for a dark QCD matter scenario
• Phenomenology of Dirac neutrino EFTs up to dimension six
• Precise Measurement of Chromoelectric Dipole Moment of the Charm Quark
• Investigating the effects of gravitational lensing by Hu-Sawicki $\mathbf{f}(\mathbf{R})$ gravity black holes
• Dark photon searches via Higgs boson production at the LHC and beyond
• Feasibility to probe the dynamical scotogenic model at the LHC
• Boosting (In)direct Detection of Dark Matter
• Fast and Fewrious: Stochastic binary perturbations from fast compact objects
• Hypothesis on the nature and origin of cold dark matter