• Question: what is dark mater?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      It’s a type of matter that doesn’t absorb or emit any electromagnetic radiation – hence dark. It’s been suggested that it makes up most of our universe!

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Even though dark matter doesn’t emit radiation (i.e., light), we know that it exists based on the gravity that it exerts on objects that do emit light. If it wasn’t for dark matter, all galaxies would just break apart!

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We’re still trying to work out exactly what dark matter is – it’s one of the things that the Large Hadron Collider, which is a huge particle accelerator experiment at CERN in France, is trying to find out. Whatever ever it is, we know it exists because of the way things we see in space act – for example, towards the edges of galaxies (like where we are in the milky way), things are orbiting around the centre of the galaxy much faster than we would expect without dark matter – without it, everything at the edges would fly off into space! So we know it’s there, but we can’t see it, because it’s a special kind of matter that doesn’t give off any light. Which is why it’s called dark matter!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I think this is a question for Roberto – he’s researching Dark Matter I think!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We think Dark matter might be made up a new kind of particle (called “neutralino”, a funny name that comes from Italian, meaning “little neutral thingy”). This particle is the last survivor of a whole bunch of particles that were once abundant, but have since a long time died out. So this dark matter could be, in a sense, the Highlander of particle physics — the last survivor from the Big Bang itself.

      But we haven’t found it yet, so we need to keep looking. Incredibly, dark matter is thought to be 5 times more abundant than normal matter!

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