• Question: Hi Roberto, love your project to discover more about the world we live in but my question is... what is black matter

    Asked by to Roberto on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Great question — I wish I knew the answer!

      Nobody knows for sure what dark matter is. We think it might be a new type of particle that we haven’t discovered yet. This particle needs to be pretty strange: it does not emit nor absorb light (that’s why we call it “dark”), and it probably needs to be very heavy (perhaps 1000 times heavier than a proton, a type of particle that makes up atoms).

      So we need to find out, and many many scientists (including myself) are working very hard to do this!

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