海角社区

Join us on Thursday, March 26th for a Special Public Talk, "The Mystery of Dark Matter in the Universe" by Dr. Katherine Freese from The University of Texas, Austin. The event is FREE and open to everyone. No registration required!

Katherine Freese is the Director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics as well as the Jeff & Gail Endowed Chair of Physics at the University of Texas, Austin. She works on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang. She is the author of a book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter. Find out more about her on

About the Talk: The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe, from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars, constitute only 5% of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The remaining 95% is made up of a recipe of 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy, both nonluminous components whose nature remains a mystery. Freese will recount the hunt for dark matter, from the discoveries of visionary scientists like Knut Lundmark and Fritz Zwicky, who argued for the existence of dark matter in the 1930鈥檚, to the deluge of data today from underground laboratories, satellites in space, and the Large Hadron Collider. Theorists contend that dark matter consists of fundamental particles, and candidates include axions, WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), and fuzzy dark matter. Billions of them pass through our bodies every second without us even realizing it, yet their gravitational pull is capable of whirling stars and gas at breakneck speeds around the centers of galaxies, and bending light from distant bright objects. In this talk Freese will provide an overview of this Cosmic Cocktail, including the evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. Many cosmologists believe we may be on the verge of solving this mystery, which will be an epochal discovery in humankind's quest to understand the universe.