Dark Matter
12 Mar, 2015
520 Astronomy
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance which is believed to make up most of the Universe. In 1932 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noticed that the speed at which galaxies moved was at odds with the amount of material they appeared to contain. He hypothesized that much of this ‘missing’ matter was simply invisible to telescopes. Today astronomers and particle physicists are still fascinated by the search for dark matter and the question of what it is.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
- Carolin Crawford
20 episodes
Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Astronomy - Carlos Frenk
2 episodes
Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham -
Anne Green No other episodes
Reader in Physics at the University of Nottingham
Reading list
-
Behind the Scenes of the Universe: From the Higgs to Dark Matter
Gianfranco Bertone (Oxford University Press, 2013) Google Books → -
The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter
Katherine Freese (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Fate of the Cosmos
Iain Nicholson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) -
Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe
Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton (Princeton University Press, 2013) Google Books → -
The Dark Matter Problem: A Historical Perspective
Robert Sanders (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →
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Programme ID: b054t3s2
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054t3s2
Auto-category: 520 (Astronomy & allied sciences)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. Something in our universe is missing, or rather almost everything, most of the matter in existence.