“The Mystery of Dark Matter in the Universe”
The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe, from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars, constitute only 5% of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The remaining 95% is made up of a recipe of 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy, both nonluminous components whose nature remains a mystery. Freese will recount the stories of the dark matter puzzle, starting with the discoveries of visionary scientists from the 1930s who first proposed its existence, to Vera Rubin in the 1970s whose observations conclusively showed its dominance in galaxies, to the deluge of data today from underground laboratories, satellites in space, and the Large Hadron Collider. Theorists contend that dark matter most likely consists of new fundamental particles; the best candidates include WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), axions, light or fuzzy dark matter, or even primordial black holes. Billions of the particles would pass through our bodies every second without us even realizing it, yet their gravitational pull is capable of whirling stars and gas at breakneck speeds around the centers of galaxies, and bending light from distant bright objects. In this talk Freese will provide an overview of this cosmic cocktail, including the evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. She will also talk about Dark Stars, early stars powered by dark matter, that may have already been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. Solving the dark matter mystery will be an epochal moment in humankind’s quest to understand the universe.
About
Katherine Freese is the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics and a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin. She is known for her work on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang. She is author of a book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter, published in June 2014 by Princeton University Press. She was awarded the 2019 Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society “for ground-breaking research at the interface of cosmology and particle physics, and her tireless efforts to communicate the excitement of physics to the general public.” In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Katherine Freese
Professor, University Texas at AustinDirector, Weinberg Institute and Texas Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics