6th year of Science on Tap

Thanks to the continued support of UNM, Explora and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History

 

 A time to eat, drink & talk about science!

on Central

Join us Thursday, November 2nd at 5:30

Dr TerBeek has had to postpone his talk until sometime next Spring.

Our own Sarah Pratt from Explora is putting together some Chemistry Demos - see you in a few hours!

Dark Matter: Origins, Evidence and Why you Should Care

Russell TerBeek, Ph.D.

Physicist

Raytheon Albuquerque

As we look out into the night sky, it is tempting to think that the universe as we see it, as vast and magnificent as it is, could not possibly be any stranger.  But, back in the 1970s, physicists and astronomers began to suspect that all we could see couldn’t possibly be all there was.  In order to explain the behavior of galaxies, and even clusters of galaxies, some kind of stuff that clumped together and yet didn’t emit light – “dark matter” – needed to be thrown into the picture.  In fact, in order to fit the observational data, about four-fifths of all the matter in the universe would need to be “dark.”  For tonight’s talk, I’ll discuss the history of dark matter in astronomy, the ongoing search to find it on both astronomical and microscopic scales, some of the theories of what could make up this mysterious form of matter, and the experimental evidence so far.