• Question: when did we discover dark matter?

    Asked by Jennifer Strutt to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      We still haven’t really discovered dark matter because no one knows what it is! We have many particle experiments like the particle smashers at CERN and dark matter detection tanks that hope to see dark matter, but none have managed it yet!

      But we think that dark matter is there because an astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933 first noticed that there wasn’t enough gravity in galaxies to keep them orbiting around each other in the Coma galaxy cluster. We also see similar things in galaxies, where the stars within galaxies don’t have enough mass to keep them in orbit, they should be flying off all over the place.

      But really maybe dark matter doesn’t exist? If our calculations for gravity is wrong then we wouldn’t need dark matter, and there are many scientists working on these so called ‘modified gravity’ models

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 11 Nov 2017:

      Just like Maggie said, we haven’t found out what dark matter is – we’ve just seen the effects of some mystery thing in the Universe that we can’t explain otherwise and call dark matter.

    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Trick Question! We haven’t discovered dark matter
      The best way we can tell is by how fast the galaxies are spinning. They’re too fast for how much mass we can see, which means there’s more mass we can’t see. We call that mass ‘dark matter’
      Some scientists don’t think that there is any missing mass and that we just don’t understand gravity enough! They come up with special theories called “Modified Newtonian Dynamics” (MOND) Theories . None of them really work yet, but the maths is very interesting!
      Great Question,
      Ryan

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