• Question: Where do you think astrophisicists are going to find dark matter? (Dark matter is the hidden weight of the universe).

    Asked by BrennanW to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 14 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      We had about this subject just today.
      They are searching hard with lots of experiments. In the next decade they think they will either have found it, or pretty much ruled out the chance of finding it by directly “seeing” it. This still doesn’t mean is doesn’t exist if they don’t find it, just that it doesn’t want to be found in a sense, that it doesn’t interact in any other way than by gravity.

    • Photo: Heather Campbell

      Heather Campbell answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      I think experiments like the Large Hadron Collider are going to be the most likely places to locate the particles that make up dark matter, or as Julian says it might not be able to be directly detected at all.

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hi Brennan, fantastic question 😀
      We know that dark matter underlies all structure in the Universe, kind of like a great cosmic scaffolding! It makes up a huge component of each galaxy – we can clearly see it is there by studying the rotation speeds of stars/gas at different distances from the galactic centres. We also know it is there in massive amounts inside of what we call ‘galaxy clusters’ – very large numbers of galaxies grouped together. If we could see dark matter, we think it would be spread around the Universe like a web –

      Astrophysicists are using a combination of computer simulations and observations to figure out properties of this dark matter, while particle physicists are searching for it trying to detect a direct signal of its presence (at the LHC for example).

      Some really cool research into dark matter revolves around these galaxy clusters I mentioned. Sometimes the amount of hidden matter is so concentrated that its mass bends the light coming from behind the cluster, like this – There’s also a really famous case of 2 clusters colliding – ‘the bullet cluster’ – where the dark matter is behaving much different to the ‘regular’ matter. Very interesting stuff!

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