Dark Matter Reveals the Structure of the Universe

by BIG THINK EDITORS NOVEMBER 20, 2013, 12:00

Image via Bigthink.com

Physics is both deeply inspiring and deeply humbling, in a way that few other disciplines are today. On the one hand, physicists have found the elusive Higgs boson, the particle responsible for mass. On the other hand, physicists are comparatively clueless when it comes to dark matter, which makes up the vast majority of the Universe.

Comparatively clueless, that is to say, but not completely clueless.

In the video below, Joel Primack, an astrophysicist at the University of California-Santa Cruz, explains that we don’t yet know the real nature of the dark matter “beyond that it’s pretty cold.” Cold refers to the terminology that Primack coined in 1983. Dark matter is either hot, warm or cold “depending on how rapidly it’s moving in the early stages of the Big Bang,” Primack says.

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Through the Wormhole: What Are We Really Made Of?

Through the Wormhole: What Are We Really Made Of?

Our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years, and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up.

Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of. Or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.

http://science.discovery.com

Bigger, faster, stronger: stepping up the hunt for cosmic building blocks

Professor Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern, will attend the opening of Collider at
London's Science Museum this week. Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/AP

Building it cost £5bn; it took 20 years to construct, and is still to operate at full strength. Yet scientists have already turned their attention to designing a replacement for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator which last year revealed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic entity which plays a key role in giving mass to the building blocks of the universe.

Proposals for a new machine include building a giant underground circular tunnel. This would be similar to the LHC – which is based at the Geneva HQ of Cern, the European particle physics laboratory – but would be more than 100km in diameter: four times the size of the current collider. An alternative device would hurtle particles in straight lines along a tunnel that would be more than 50km long.

In either case, the bursts of intense energy that would be released by colliding particles in these machines would help scientists probe matter to new levels. In particular, it would help them pinpoint material known as dark matter which is believed to account for most of the mass of the universe today.

Continue Learning: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/10/particle-physics-universe-building-blocks-large-hadron-collider