and enablers.

seriously, though, k and r for this excellent information.

And think that this time I may be able to understand what is being said, but after about a paragraph or so I am soooo lost. Politics I get. I know more than 99% of everybody about Politics, but space. Damn man, I am lost. Space is sooo overwhelming. It's almost even too much to even grasp and comprehend.

1. Astronomers noticed years ago that galaxies and galaxy clusters don't orbit around their centers of mass like expected -- e.g., objects far from the center orbited much faster than gravitational laws expected. Some scientists speculated that there might be a large cloud of unseen matter around and within these distant objects that could help explain the orbits of the visible objects.

2. Anything with mass (or energy) bends the fabric of space-time, and that causes passing light to bend along such curvature. It can create an effect known as "gravitational lensing" if a distant galaxy's light goes around objects with mass. General Relativity provides a means to calculate the light bending.

3. Astronomers noticed that light from distant galaxies gets bent far more than expected from what's visible in more nearby galaxies, so that's an indication that there's indeed more mass than what's expected.

4. A "smoking gun" for dark matter was the observation of the "Bullet Cluster," galaxies that collided. Most of the mass from ordinary matter rubbed against each other and heated up near the center. Objects like stars, which are separated by vast distances and actually aren't the source of most galactic mass despite their high densities, passed by each other. Thus, most of the gravitational lensing should have been observed near the center where the diffuse gas molecules collided. Instead, most lensing was detected near the outside with the stars (which had collectively less mass). That's an indication that the mysterious matter, called dark matter, also mostly passed through with little interaction to other particles.

5. Nobody yet knows what comprises dark matter, but it apparently has lots of mass and it apparently doesn't interact with ordinary visible matter very much, if at all, except by gravity.

but I need to see it in simpler terms, if possible. So let's say our sun is an apple, and all stars are apples. Would an object that is considered dark matter be incomparable, let's say an orange? Or would it be invisible? Or opaque?
Or am I way off??

... that have never been detected before. It wouldn't be composed of "ordinary particles" that make up the Sun, planets, us, etc.

It's believed to be passing through us undetected all the time. Gravity is a VERY weak force compared to other forces. Since gravity is always additive, it only becomes very noticeable when large bodies of mass clump together, mostly from other forces. The dark matter would be very hard to detect if it doesn't clump together. EDIT: Dark matter's collective gravity would be quite large if it's indeed widely dispersed around galaxies in huge numbers.

They're looking for signs of dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider, but they'll probably only detect momentum imbalances if it's created there. It will be indirect evidence, in other words.

Colliders create particles out of the surrounding space due to the energy of the collisions -- i.e., E(nergy) = M(ass)*C^2. A large amount of energy is "equivalent" to a small amount of mass since C (the speed of light) is a big number. The created particles aren't the "innards" of the colliding particles. I'm not sure why I went into that, but you might think it's interesting.

It's possible that dark matter isn't composed of unknown particles outside of ordinary matter at all. Could it be low-mass black holes? There's been all kinds of speculation. Many physicists have reasons for liking the non-clumping, slow-moving (cold), gravity-interacting idea more than others.

Ok. That makes sense.

We just have to discover the properties of this unknown entity.

But the problem is, it will take a hell of a long time to get there..

to reach a galaxy 300 million light-years away...
http://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/warp/

Use a transwarp drive or travel through Borg tech.

then there is nothing wrong with that!

I wonder if there are alternate pathways that lead to stars that just run out fuel without all the fireworks? Just cool off and become inert?