Through use of a lecture-slide format, this book presents an astrophysics detective story that chronicles Jerome Drexler's literature search for astronomical clues and evidence to unveil the nature of dark matter.
There are a number of mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology that have remained unsolved for decades. What is dark matter? How exactly are stars created? In 1998, it was determined from supernova studies that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating, thereby creating the mystery of dark energy. Astrophysicists have developed mutually exclusive, single-phenomenon theories for each of these three phenomena, but not a unified theory for all three of them. The author's original goal was to identify dark matter, a decades-old mystery. In the process, he developed a new theory for dark matter and illuminated the nature of dark energy and the process of Sun formation.
Since dark matter may have been instrumental in the creation of galaxies and stars, the author decided to test his new dark matter theory on the formation of the Sun. The results were very encouraging.
He next sought a possible link between dark matter and the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which is attributed to the mysterious dark energy. Using his dark matter theory and the laws of physics, the author explained the accelerating expansion of the Universe in a plausible manner.
This book chronicles the author's search for a unified astrophysical theory and how it finally evolved.