Uncovering Dark Matter Mysteries with Katherine Freese

Summary

Highlights

• 03:44

  We go back, we came up... Basically, we're the same generation coming up through the ranks.

• 04:40

  So we want to know, like, dark matter, dark energy, dark stars, dark, everything dark.

• 07:54

  So Katie, if you also still do not know what it is, what do you think it might be?

• 09:33

  And we astronomers, we said, there must be some planet that we can't see that's too close to the Sun, lost in the glare, and that's tugging on it.

• 17:12

  And the heaviest ones decay to lighter ones, to lighter ones, da-da-da-da-da, until you get to the lightest one.

• 24:49

  And in fact, the big push in the particle experimental community in the United States is to build experiments to measure neutrino properties.

• 30:40

  The dark stars would have been the first stars to form in the history of the universe when it was 200 million years old, and we're now at 14 billion years.

• 38:46

  Yeah, and guess what happens to the million solar mass, something that weighs a million times as much as the sun with no heat source anymore.

• 45:54

  So we're waiting for more data.

• 47:49

  And we also talked about what kind of dark matter particles you would get out, and so we have things like cannibal dark matter, we have dark zillas, we had a lot of fun.

Keywords

• Dark Matter

  A form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe, not directly observable but inferred from gravitational effects.

• Supersymmetry

  A theoretical framework in particle physics that suggests a relationship between two basic classes of elementary particles: bosons and fermions.

• Dark Stars

  Hypothetical stars that are powered by dark matter annihilation rather than nuclear fusion.

• JWST (James Webb Space Telescope)

  A space telescope designed to observe the most distant objects in the universe, providing insights into the early universe.

• WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles)

  Hypothetical particles that are candidates for dark matter, interacting via the weak force and gravity.

• Axions

  Hypothetical elementary particles proposed as a component of dark matter.

• Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

  A theory of gravitation that describes gravity as a property of the geometry of space and time.

• Neutrinos

  Subatomic particles that are very light and weakly interacting, often produced in nuclear reactions.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction and Sponsors

• 01:57 Introduction to StarTalk and Hosts

• 03:44 Discussion on Dark Matter

• 09:14 Theoretical Physics and Supersymmetry

• 17:25 Dark Matter Interactions and Experiments

• 29:33 Dark Stars and Early Universe

• 38:41 Dark Matter and Black Holes

• 45:57 Dark Big Bang and Future Research

• 54:30 Conclusion and Reflections

Transcript

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Shownotes