• Question: What do you think about dark matter?

    Asked by anon-202071 to Sophia, Meirin, George, Andy on 14 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 14 Mar 2019:


      I think that Dark Matter is really cool! The Planck satellite measured that there’s about 5 times more dark matter than normal matter in our universe.
      So why haven’t we found Dark Matter on Earth?
      We’re actively looking for Dark Matter in many particle physics experiments, such as at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)…but we haven’t found it yet. It’s still hiding somewhere.
      Maybe the job of discovering the particle corresponding to Dark Matter will fall on your generation of scientists!

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 14 Mar 2019:


      I think dark matter is really crazy. So many theories predict that much more of it must exist than normal matter (everything we can see and have studied so far) and yet we still don’t know what it is or how to find it.

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 15 Mar 2019:


      It’s quite mad that 90%+ of the matter in the universe is stuff that we can’t see. That number seems to be pretty consistent between lots of indirect ways to measure what’s out there, yet we’ve never managed to see any directly. We have some ideas, but the “obvious” ones are mostly ruled out now, and even the wacky versions are under pressure. Even more bonkers is that all matter only seems to be 30% of the stuff that makes the universe bend and expand on a huge scale: the other 70% is “dark energy” which really is almost completely mysterious to us.

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