Supervisor: Maximillian Stritzinger

According to today’s cosmological concordance model Dark matter and energy are two main components of the universe. Despite this, we know very little of their nature, mainly due to the lack of interaction between these media and radiation.

This colloquium will explore the basic understanding of dark matter and energy. I will begin with summarizing the history of dark matter and energy and explain the necessity of their existence. I will then move on to present different possible explanations of the nature of these phenomena that we know of such as quintessence, vacuum energy, MACHOS etc.

To conclude a new alternative model proposed by J. S. Farnes will be reviewed. This model combines dark energy and dark matter into a single “dark fluid” with negative mass. This alternative form of matter repels baryonic matter via “gravitational repulsion” and repel other negative masses. These weird properties are used by Farnes to explain phenomena usually attributed to dark matter and energy such as flattening of rotational curves in galaxies and the expansion of the universe.