5

When the Nibblonians eat their food it is digested and it comes out as dense black balls known as 'Dark Matter'. I've also heard of 'Dark Matter' in real life, and was wondering if has anything to do with the Futurama version?

calccrypto
  • 6,550
  • 4
  • 40
  • 45
202
  • 6,053
  • 12
  • 36
  • 61

2 Answers2

7

No. The similarity lies only in the name. The writers have even admitted (in the audio commentaries found on the DVD's and BluRays) that they used dark matter as the name due to the fact that it was a hot topic (when the show was created in the late 1990's) and because no one really knew much about what it was.

Gabe Willard
  • 21,119
  • 15
  • 108
  • 124
Quispiam
  • 186
  • 2
5

No, dark matter and Nibblonian waste products are similar only in name and have little to do with one another.

The highly dense material produced by Nibblonians shares characteristics with super-dense matter such as neutronium. When stars near the end of their lifespan and use up their hydrogen fuel, they begin a transformation, which when it is complete, compresses their matter (by compressing their electron shells into the center of their atoms) creating a super-dense material called neutronium. The waste products of Nibblonians have a similar characteristic in that they are very massive though they take up very little physical space.

Dark matter is a scientific theory which says most of the matter of the universe is invisible to the naked eye and composed of a matter that is undetectable but nonetheless real. That non-baryonic matter has the ability to affect normal matter and can be detected by its gravitational effects on normal matter. The dark matter theory says that baryonic matter (the stuff planets, stars and everything else we can see in the universe) composes only about five percent of the actually matter in the universe. The rest is invisible, nearly intangible, non-baryonic, dark matter.

From NASA's Science Beta page:

It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter.

Also See: Why does Nibbler's poop only get super heavy after he has pooped it?

Thaddeus Howze
  • 212,750
  • 23
  • 708
  • 994
  • I reversed the edits made to this entry because if NASA tells me the universe is 5% baryonic matter (the stuff we can see through our various types of telescopes) then until they tell me otherwise I am going to consider them a viable source. – Thaddeus Howze Jul 12 '17 at 23:15
  • Actually the edit you reversed was (almost) factually accurate. As your quote says, 5% of the energy density in the universe is baryonic matter, but since 68% of the universe's energy is dark energy, not matter, it's actually 5/(5+27) or ~16% of the matter that is baryonic. And another nitpick: it's not true that dark matter is undetectable, only that it's very difficult to detect. There are several experiments trying to detect dark matter particles, though so far without success. – David Z Jul 13 '17 at 04:00
  • Pedantically "detection without success" is "undetectable..." – Thaddeus Howze Jul 13 '17 at 20:26
  • No, it's not. "(attempts at) detection without success" means undetected, not undetectable. If something is undetectable, no matter what you do you will never be able to detect it, which is not necessarily the case if you only know that previous attempts at detection have failed. – David Z Jul 13 '17 at 20:51