The latest results from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite suggest it makes up 85% of all the matter in the universe (up from an earlier estimate of around 80%).Like the Higgs boson, though, the actual particles of which dark matter is composed have proved elusive.
Besides lending credence to the big bang theory, the CMB data let astrophysicists calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding (which was revised down a bit in the light of the Planck results), and thus its age (which was revised up, by 50m years or so, to 13.8 billion years).
But besides adorning boffins' walls, all-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the latest and most detailed of which came on March 21st courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, hold oodles of cosmological information.
You start with the square of an electron's charge, divide it by the speed of light and Planck's constant, then multiply the whole lot by two pi.
In April the European Space Agency's Planck satellite presented the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a relic of the radiation produced 400,000 years after the big bang, which holds clues to the universe's birth pangs 13.8 billion years ago.For all its successes, though, modern physics leaves some crucial questions unanswered.
Planck, a now-defunct satellite that belonged to the European Space Agency, also studied the cosmic microwave background and its data are now being crunched.
For to solve his problem, Planck had had to invent the notion of the quantum.At the time, the idea that light travels in distinct packets of energy the quanta after which the theory is named—seemed preposterous.
The Wellcome Trust (a British medical charity), the Max Planck Society (which runs a lot of German research institutes) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (an American charity) have set up eLife, a peer-reviewed journal that does not charge publication fees.
And poor Ernst Ruska, at the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, designed the first electron microscope in 1933 but only received his Nobel prize in 1986.
Such effects do not, in fact, show up.Nor need physicists look only to the sky to see Planck-scale effects.
"For Germany this is a paradigm shift," says Jürgen Baumert, head of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin.Paradigms in the way schools are managed do not suddenly shift, but they do evolve.
