In Search of Dark Matter

Astronomy was once a quest for light. For millions of years, humans stared wide-eyed at the night sky trying to piece together the nature of the Universe we live in. But because of the limitations of the naked eye, the vast majority of our ancestors never suspected, and none knew, that the stars were other suns, nor the planets other worlds. Such revelations had to wait until the invention of the telescope, an instrument that simultaneously created and fulfilled the possibility of seeing fainter, more distant objects in the universe. While the earliest telescopes were capable of little more than today s toy telescopes, they nonetheless revealed for the first time the moons of Jupiter, craters on our own Moon, and the myriad of fainter stars in the Milky Way. As telescopic power grew it was assumed that telescopes, being light-gatherers, would reveal ever more of the Universe that surrounds us. Eventually they would reveal everything. Indeed, modern telescopes have provided us with images of objects so distant they are not only close to the edge of the Universe, but almost at the edge of physical detectability. The interpretation of what telescopes reveal aside, without their light-gathering capability our understanding of the Universe might never have progressed beyond the Milky Way.