This is CBS I in the World. I'm John Batch with Gouverne Schilling, an astronomer,

chronicler, who is taking us into the part of astronomy that is the most confounding

and tempting to astronomers, to cosmologists, to people who read Gouverne's book. We're

looking for something that we can't see. We've never found, and we're going to try to

imagine how we can certify. It exists. We need theories wonderful, but how do we

certify it? Now we come to Jeremiah Osterker, who thanks to Gouverne, I've been led to his

book Heart of Darkness published in a few years ago. He's an astronomer with firm ideas,

and one of those firm ideas is to picture again what we can't see. It's called the halo

effect around our galaxy, the Milky Way, around all galaxies. What is that? How should

we picture it? It was a strange situation, because as we discussed before Fritz Vicki

was the one who realized there must be a lot of unseen matter in galaxies, but no one

paid too much attention back then. Only in the 1960s and the late 1960s, there were those

theories like Jerry Osterker, who started to calculate how a massive galaxy, like our

own Milky Way galaxy, could be stable, because it's all these rotating stars and gas clouds

in a flattened disk. And when he did the calculations using the first generation of big computers

back then, he realized that a flattened disk of stars cannot stay stable. It can only be

stable when there is a big spherical halo around it, filled with some kind of matter. So

the proposed that our Milky Way and other galaxies also would be surrounded by a big halo

of unseen matter. And it fitted very nicely with these observations by Fritz Vicki and

the first pioneering work by Jan Orten, Jacobus, Cappten, that there must be unseen matter

in the universe. So now we have a theoretical reason to believe it too, because without

this big halo, this surrounding spherical cloud of dark matter, a galaxy could not even

...