Dark Matter
1/13/202618 min
Dark matter is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. It’s the invisible force that glues galaxies together and sculpts cosmic structure. In this episode, we trace the journey of discovery from massive objects in the Milky Way to particle-scale experiments designed to reveal what dark matter really is. From gravitational microlensing to cutting-edge detectors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are pushing the limits of technology and imagination to uncover the unseen and understand the mass that makes up most of our universe.
Guests featured (in order of appearance):
Greg Sallaberry, Staff Scientist at LLNL...
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 0· Host0:00
[insects chirping] Australia, 1993. The night sky is clear in a way that feels intentional, as if something pulled the clouds aside to reveal what's behind them. The steady hum of the Mount Stromlo Observatory computers has become a comforting background noise. For months, its MACHO survey has stared at millions of stars, waiting to witness what some called impossible. And then it happens, a ripple in the dark, a distortion in the fabric of the universe. A single star brightens. Not much, but enough. The gravitational signature of something massive and invisible, a microlensing event witnessed for the first time.
Greg Sallaberry· Guest0:51
If you look at a place where there's a dense enough number of stars, you will at some point hope to see something pass in front of one of them. This massive object bends the light and makes it look like the light from the star is actually being amplified for a little bit.
Speaker 0· Host1:07
This brief, unexpected brightening may open the door to measuring what can't be seen.
Giancarlo Carosi· Guest1:14
It's there. It's in almost all these galaxies that you see at different levels. So it should be all around us here on Earth. The reason we haven't been able to detect it so far is because so far it interacts only gravitationally that we've seen. We're not sure at what point it'll interact with