Question: how dose dark matter effect us ? And why got you in to studing dark matter?

Roberto Trotta answered on 17 Jun 2014:

Dark matter affects us very very little. In just one second, 100,000 dark matter particles fly through your hand without you ever noticing! That’s because dark matter does not bump into normal particles and therefore it’s very hard to stop or see.

So while it does not affect us directly, we think it’s responsible for building the galaxies that we see in the sky. It is very important in creating the galaxies and therefore our solar system. Indirectly, you can see that dark matter plays a role in us being here!

I got into studying dark matter because it’s a big mystery, but one that we can probably solve in the next 5 years or so. That’s because we now have many telescopes and other machines that can either see dark matter or produce it in the lab (we hope). So I wanted to be part of this exciting research at a time when we are probably going to make a BIG discovery! That’s what excites scientists most — to discover something new that nobody has ever seen before.