Twice a day, seven days a week, from February to November for the past four years, two researchers have layered themselves with thermal underwear and outerwear, with fleece, flannel, double gloves, double socks, padded overalls and puffy red parkas, mummifying themselves until they look like twin Michelin Men.
Then they step outside, trading the warmth and modern conveniences of a science station foosball, fitness center, hour cafeteria for a minusdegree Fahrenheit featureless landscape, flatter than Kansas and one of the coldest places on the planet.
They trudge in darkness nearly a mile, across a plateau of snow and ice, until they discern, against the backdrop of more stars than any hands-in-pocket backyard observer has ever seen, the silhouette of the giant disk of the South Pole Telescope, where they join a global effort to solve possibly the greatest riddle in the universe: what most of it is made of. For thousands of years our species has studied the night sky and wondered if anything else is out there.
Galileo trained a new instrument, the telescope, on the heavens and saw objects that no other person had ever seen: hundreds of stars, mountains on the Moon, satellites of Jupiter. Since then we have found more than planets around other stars, billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond our own, even the faint radiation that is the echo of the Big Bang. Now scientists think that even this extravagant census of the universe might be as out-of-date as the five-planet cosmos that Galileo inherited from the ancients.
The rest they call, for want of a better word, dark: 23 percent is something they call dark matter, and 73 percent is something even more mysterious, which they call dark energy. Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might be—exotic and still hypothetical particles—but they have hardly a clue about dark energy.
The head of the committee that wrote the report, University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua. They are coming to terms with a deep irony: it is sight itself that has blinded us to nearly the entire universe.
And the recognition of this blindness, in turn, has inspired us to ask, as if for the first time: What is this cosmos we call home? Scientists reached a consensus in the s that there was more to the universe than meets the eye. As it rotates, it should disintegrate, shedding stars and gas in every direction. If spiral galaxies contained enough of such mystery mass, then they might well be obeying the laws of gravity. The effort to understand dark matter defined much of astronomy for the next two decades.
Astronomers may not know what dark matter is, but inferring its presence allowed them to pursue in a new way an eternal question: What is the fate of the universe?
They already knew that the universe is expanding. In , the astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that distant galaxies were moving away from us and that the farther away they got, the faster they seemed to be receding. This was a radical idea. Instead of the stately, eternally unchanging still life that the universe once appeared to be, it was actually alive in time, like a movie.
Rewind the film of the expansion and the universe would eventually reach a state of infinite density and energy—what astronomers call the Big Bang. Choose the Right Synonym for mystery Noun 1 mystery , problem , enigma , riddle , puzzle mean something which baffles or perplexes. First Known Use of mystery Noun 1 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 3a Noun 2 14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1.
Learn More About mystery. Time Traveler for mystery The first known use of mystery was in the 14th century See more words from the same century.
Statistics for mystery Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. Kids Definition of mystery. Their success is a mystery to me. Save Cite Email this content Share link with colleague or librarian You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian:. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Medieval Philosophy. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save.
Cancel Save. View Expanded. View Table. View Full Size. Corporate Social Responsibility. Mission Statement. Corporate Governance. Stay Updated. Rights and Permissions. Email Newsletter Sign-up Page. Imprints and Trademarks. Offices Worldwide. Conference and Book Fairs. By reason of this terror the savage trembled before the magician who seemed to have penetrated the mysteries of nature about him.
We enjoy mysteries, so long as they do not threaten our person. In the hands of those less skilled than the aforementioned religionists, mysteries themselves, can be used to justify virtually any behaviour. Their mechanics, in a sense, outweigh their mysteries - which may be a way of saying that the records are disturbing but not inexplicable.
All these and other mysteries are explored in this fascinating book, with the aid of some good illustrations. The material means of music are rationally quantifiable but not the mysteries of their application. The near-sacred statistics are explained; formulas are given for mysteries like the earned run average. See all examples of mystery. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
Collocations with mystery. Click on a collocation to see more examples of it. From the Hansard archive. Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3. See all collocations with mystery. Translations of mystery in Chinese Traditional.
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