Hiranya Peiris

Yeah, so this is kind of a side project, but my favourite dark matter candidate is called the axion.

Axion particles, if they exist, are very light.

So they behave less like particles and more like a radio wave permeating the universe.

And so you can kind of do a tabletop experiment in a university lab to try to detect this radio wave.

The experiment is like a radio receiver.

We have to tune it and find the right frequency, but we don't know what the frequency is.

Yes.

So we need to tune into it.

Yeah, yeah.

Give us a chance.

This is the biggest digital camera ever built.

Each image is 3.2 billion pixels.

The first images are just astonishing.

So not only are they super high resolution, but the depth is very great so that you can see much, much further into the universe.

So when you look at pictures of galaxies, for example, they look super crisp, but you can also see the force.

faint outskirts of these galaxies where gas is accumulating, which is going to feed into future generations of stars that we couldn't see before.

And also because it is a time lapse, you can see exploding stars in the universe.

We are going to use these images to map dark matter across half the sky and about halfway into the lifetime of the universe.

We can't see dark matter, but the presence of dark matter bends light when they encounter concentrations of matter.

So this causes tiny, tiny distortions in the shapes of galaxies.