Big Questions: Dark Matter

Carl Sagan's oft-quoted statement that there are "billions and billions" of stars in the cosmos gives an idea of just how much "stuff" is in the universe. However scientists now think that in addition to the type of matter with which we are familiar, there is another kind of matter out there. This new kind of matter is called "dark matter" and there seems to be five times as much as ordinary matter. Dark matter interacts only with gravity, thus light simply zips right by it. Scientists are searching through their data, trying to prove that the dark matter idea is real. Fermilab's Dr. Don Lincoln tells us why we think this seemingly-crazy idea might not be so crazy after all.

 

Dark Matter

KIPAC visualization expert Ralf Kaehler and his colleague astrophysicist Tom Abel joined forces with Carter Emmart, the history museum's director of astrovisualization, and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a museum curator and professor at Columbia University. They turned numerical simulations calculated by Abel and then-KIPAC astrophysicist Oliver Hahn into striking scenes.

 

Dark Matter

Physicists estimate that dark matter accounts for about twenty three percent of the known universe - the only problem is that no one really knows what it is...

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Dark matter is a circus master in the universe

The expansion of the universe, the big bang and dark matter. Astronomers talk us through what we know and don't know about the universe.

 

Supercomputing Sheds Light on the Dark Universe

At Argonne National Laboratory, scientists are using supercomputers to shed light on one of the great mysteries in science today, the Dark Universe. With Mira, a petascale supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a team led by physicists Salman Habib and Katrin Heitmann will run the largest, most complex simulation of the universe ever attempted.

By contrasting the results from Mira with state-of-the-art telescope surveys, the scientists hope to gain new insights into the distribution of matter in the universe, advancing future investigations of dark energy and dark matter into a new realm.

The team's research was named a finalist for the 2012 Gordon Bell Prize, an award recognizing outstanding achievement in high-performance computing.

 

Secrets of the Dark Universe: Simulating the Sky on the Blue Gene/Q

An astonishing 99.6% of our Universe is dark. Observations indicate that the Universe consists of 70% of a mysterious dark energy and 25% of a yet unidentified dark matter component, and only 0.4% of the remaining ordinary matter is visible. Understanding the physics of this dark sector is the foremost challenge in cosmology today. Sophisticated simulations of the evolution of the Universe play a crucial task in this endeavor.

 

The Evolution of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Over the course of its 50 year history, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has evolved from a groundbreaking particle physics research facility to one of the world's foremost multipurpose laboratories. Here lab director Persis Drell tells the story of how the focus of research at SLAC has grown and changed since the earliest days.

(SLAC is for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

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Dark Matter - Sixty Symbols

We take a look at mysterious dark matter - and a chocolate pie.
More videos at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

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Yale: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Lecture 21

Class begins with a review of the mysterious nature of dark matter, which accounts for three quarters of the universe. Different models of the universe are graphed. The nature, frequency, and duration of supernovae are then addressed. Professor Bailyn presents data from the Supernova Cosmology Project and pictures of supernovae taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery of dark energy is revisited and the density of dark energy is calculated. The Big Rip is presented as an alternative hypothesis for the fate of the universe.

Other lectures from this course

Minute Physics: What is Dark Matter?

Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute!

In this episode, we discuss Dark Matter, an exotic type of matter we know very little about, despite the fact that it makes up around 80% of all matter in the universe!

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