Dark Matter

12 Mar, 2015 520 Astronomy

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance which is believed to make up most of the Universe. In 1932 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noticed that the speed at which galaxies moved was at odds with the amount of material they appeared to contain. He hypothesized that much of this ‘missing’ matter was simply invisible to telescopes. Today astronomers and particle physicists are still fascinated by the search for dark matter and the question of what it is.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Carolin Crawford 19 episodes
    Public Astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Astronomy
  • Carlos Frenk 2 episodes
    Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham
  • Anne Green No other episodes
    Reader in Physics at the University of Nottingham

Reading list

  • Behind the Scenes of the Universe: From the Higgs to Dark Matter
    Gianfranco Bertone (Oxford University Press, 2013) Google Books →
  • The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter
    Katherine Freese (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books →
  • Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Fate of the Cosmos
    Iain Nicholson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
  • Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe
    Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton (Princeton University Press, 2013) Google Books →
  • The Dark Matter Problem: A Historical Perspective
    Robert Sanders (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: b054t3s2

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054t3s2

Auto-category: 520 (Astronomy & allied sciences)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. Something in our universe is missing, or rather almost everything, most of the matter in existence.