dark matter
dark matter noun: matter which cannot be detected by its radiation but whose presence is inferred from gravitational effects.
Noun
dark matter (uncountable)
- Matter which cannot be detected by its radiation but whose presence is inferred from gravitational effects.
- The evidence for dark matter in galaxies started to accumulate in the mid-1970s. By the following decade it became clear that essentially all galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are surrounded by extensive halos of dark matter.2001, Susan M. Fitzpatrick, John T. Brue, Carving Our Destiny: Scientific Research Faces a New Millennium
- On large scales like that of clusters of galaxies, gravitational lensing indicates that the dark matter is smoothly distributed, on the average.2004, L. Bergström, A. Goobar, “Particle Astrophysics and the Dark Sector of the Universe”, in John W. Mason, editor, Astrophysics Update, pages 124–125
- Matter which has mass but which does not readily interact with normal matter except through gravitational effects.
- Unclassified or poorly understood genetic material.
dark matter meaning in Tamil, Kannada, Arabic and Malay
dark matter in Tamil
- இருள் பருப்பொருள், இருண்ட பருப்பொருள், கரும் பொருண்மம், கருமைப் பிண்டம்
dark matter in Kannada
- particles of matter that cannot be detected by their radiation
- ಡಾರ್ಕ್ ಮ್ಯಾಟರ್ ḍārk myāṭar
dark matter in Arabic
- particles of matter that cannot be detected by their radiation
- مَادَّة مَظْلِمَة mādda maẓlima
dark matter in Malay
- particles of matter that cannot be detected by their radiation
- jirim gelap
More languagesFewer languages
- dark matter in Indonesian
- materi gelap
- dark matter in Persian
- ماده تاریک mâdde-ye târik
- dark matter in Thai
- สสารมืด sàsăan mêut
- dark matter in Vietnamese
- vật chất tối
Origin of dark matter
The term is often said to have been coined in 1933 by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in German (as Dunkle Materie), but it had already been in use for decades, in French (matière obscure) by Henri Poincaré as early as 1906, and in English. In contrast to these earlier authors, Zwicky used the term to refer to 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, which led him to infer the existence of nonluminous matter to account for the missing mass. The term gained new popularity in the 1970s as a result of Vera Rubin's publishing (in English) her discovery that some galaxies did not seem to have enough mass to account for their rotation curves.
Words formed from dark matter
Questions about dark matter
- What does dark matter mean?
- Dark matter means matter which cannot be detected by its radiation but whose presence is inferred from gravitational effects.
- What is dark matter in Tamil?
- Dark matter in Tamil is இருள் பருப்பொருள், இருண்ட பருப்பொருள், கரும் பொருண்மம். See Dark matter meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is dark matter?
- Dark matter is a noun.
Words near dark matter in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dark matter (page history and authors); dark matter (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-dark matter.wav.
Cite this entry: “dark matter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dark_matter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.