• Question: what is dark matter made of

    Asked by anon-191713 to Graeme on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Graeme Poole

      Graeme Poole answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      We have no idea. Dark matter makes up 85% of the universe. But we really have not got a clue what it is made of. Dark matter does not interact with anything so we can’t measure it to find what it’s made of.

      Whoever discovers that will win the Nobel Prize and be the most famous scientist alive!

Comments

  • Photo: Anne

    Anne commented on :

    We don’t know, but we have lots of ideas! We know, from looking at how stars and galaxies move and cluster together, that dark matter is some new form of matter which interacts only weakly with the normal matter. The most popular idea is Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs for short. They do exact what their name says: they interact weakly with normal matter and each other and are very heavy. If they exist they would have been produced in the Big Bang in the right amount. Theories like string theory, which try and unify the funamental forces, predict that they should exist. And there are lots of experiments underway trying to detect WIMPs. Another possibility is Primordial Black Holes, black holes which were made just after the Big Bang.