Did we just discover dark matter?

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Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe 52 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 2 hours ago

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What is dark matter and why do scientists believe it exists?

Unknown 0:00

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Unknown 0:12

Most of the universe is dark. Not just because space is dark, vast stretches of emptiness illuminated by distant points of light, but because matter itself is dark. Most of the universe turns out to not be made out of our kind of matter, atoms, etc., but something else, something darker. Stars and gas and dust are like tracers that hint at a much more massive mystery underneath. For decades, we've been confident that dark matter is real. It's out there, it's massive, its gravity is influencing the universe. But what is it? That's the deep question in the heart of a particle physicist. What is it made out of? Is it particles? Is it something else even weirder? Very recently, an experiment underground in South Dakota might have seen the first hint of an answer to that question.

Unknown 1:10

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Dark Universe.

Kelly Weinersmith 1:27

Hello, I'm Kelly Wheatersmith. I study parasites and space, and one of the great things about knowing a lot of scientists is that when something's in the news, you almost always have someone you can reach out to to be like, how excited should I be? And today we all get to find out how excited we should be.

Unknown 1:45

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I like to think about aliens, and today I'm quite excited about Dark Mat, the television show, Dark Matter the Science, and the kind of dark matter we all produce daily.

Kelly Weinersmith 1:57

Oh, I well I'm always excited about that, mostly because it often has parasites in it. But Daniel, my question for you is not if you live in the United States, I don't want to get people worried about parasites. But okay, my question for you is today we're talking about like a big result that was announced relative to dark matter. What was your response when you heard the news?

Unknown 2:16

My response was, ooh, that's interesting.

Kelly Weinersmith 2:19

Okay.

Unknown 2:20

Because it's not something I expected. These experiments have been looking for dark matter forever and it's been a parade of negative results of we didn't see anything. Nope. We didn't find anything. Nope. Nothing here for like more than a decade. So at some point you start getting bored and you stop paying attention to all their news releases because they're all the same. But I saw people posting on Twitter in advance of this one saying, Y'all better show up for this one. This one's something different. So there was a lot of buzz before this one. And then the result itself was quite weird. So there's a lot to dig into here.

Kelly Weinersmith 2:53

Yeah, I'm excited because I'm I'm pretty sure that you and I have talked about this experiment on the show before and we've been like, Oh, but those giant vats haven't found anything. But today we get to talk about how maybe maybe they found something.

Unknown 3:06

Maybe the giant vats will tell us something about the universe. Amazing. Amazing.

Kelly Weinersmith 3:11

And we you know, we did the thing that we always do when we have an interesting question. We see what the extraordinaries have to say about it. And so you wrote the extraordinaries and asked, Did the L Z experiment just observe a particle of dark matter? That was a very specific question you sent them, Daniel.

Unknown 3:29

Based on experience, I try to give them a few clues so they know at least a little bit about what we're talking about. Plus, I was curious about how much of this news had penetrated into the sort of global news cycle.

Kelly Weinersmith 3:41

Yeah. All right. Well, let's see what they had to say.

Unknown 3:43

We're not ready to say for sure that it's it's dark matter. It must be something to do with dark matter, so I hope it did. Well if it did, that would be absolutely massive. So I feel very confident saying nope, no dark matter particles actually detected. Really curious to know your opinion about it. But my guess would be that they found something interesting but not dark matter. It's possible that the L Z experiment discovered a dark matter particle. Okay, thanks, bye. Lazy experiment did not observe dark matter because dark matter is too lazy to interact with anything. That'd be amazing, but I think it's too good news to be true.

Kelly Weinersmith 4:22

Well, I love our extraordinaries.