Dark matter beyond the stars

Uranus had irregularities in its orbit that deviated from what Newton predicted. It was then theorized that these irregularities may be due to the gravitational attraction on Uranus by other planets beyond Uranus's orbit that had not yet been discovered. Calculations were performed based on Newton's law of gravity to determine where the location of such a new planet would have to be in order to explain these irregularities in Uranus's orbit. When the telescopes were then pointed in this direction, they did indeed discover a new planet exactly where the calculations had predicted. The planet was named Neptune. Just as an explanation consistent with Newton's law of gravity was found for the orbit of Uranus, it was believed that one day in the future a similar explanation would be found for Mercury. The world waited patiently for this explanation, which never came. At the beginning of the 20th century, for reasons completely unrelated to the orbit of Mercury, Albert Einstein developed the general theory of relativity. Einstein's theory was able to make all the same correct predictions that Newton's theory was able to make, but unlike Newton, Einstein also correctly predicted the orbit of the planet Mercury. But, just as Newton's was not initially able to fully explain the behavior of Uranus or Mercury, there are also two phenomena that Einstein's theory is not presently able to fully explain. We have called these two phenomena dark energy and dark matter. The orbit of Mercury was evidence we had all along that Newton's laws of motion gave an incomplete picture of the true nature of time and space. Similarly, dark matter and dark may be evidence already in our possession that the true nature of reality is far more remarkable and even far more mysterious than anything we can presently imagine within the confines of general relativity and quantum mechanics. For example, one of the possible theories behind dark matter is that its effects are really the result of parallel universes that don't interact with each other in any way other than gravity. The matter in the parallel universes would be gravitationally attracted to the matter in our universe, and hence the galaxies of nearby parallel universes would tend to form at the same locations as the galaxies in our universe. The gravitational attraction from the galaxies in these parallel universes would cause our galaxies to appear to us to have more mass than they really do, which corresponds to what we can presently observe.