8) Behind the Scenes
As with most good pieces of stagecraft, the smooth running of the following scenes is made possible due to something that has been doing the heavy lifting in the background. That something is known as Dark Matter. The name may sound sinister, but in actual fact it is has been a great help in bringing about the reality we know and love, as it gave assistance to the formation of important phenomena in the early universe. It is only called ‘dark’ because we can’t see it, as it doesn’t interact at all with photons. As a result, we don’t really understand much about Dark Matter yet (even though, ahem, it is said to make up about 83% of the mass of the universe), but we know it is a benevolent stranger.
It has been around since the very beginning, during which time its own structure has evolved from a homogeneous clump into a universal web, with a network of filaments and nodes that have the ability to collect and compresses ordinary matter, because there is something Dark Matter does interact with – Gravity. The very first atoms formed were attracted towards the nodes in the Dark Matter web. Vast quantities of Hydrogen and Helium (that’s pretty much all there was at this point) fell inwards, into the bones of the dark matter skeleton. the pressure of gravity increased as they bundled together into gigantic clouds, and they became denser, and denser, until the forces acting upon them made them start to swirl.
