The search for dark matter -- and what we've found so far

Roughly 85 percent of mass in the universe is "dark matter" -- mysterious material that can't be directly observed but has an immense influence on the cosmos. What exactly is this strange stuff, and what does it have to do with our existence? Astrophysicist Risa Wechsler explores why dark matter may be the key to understanding how the universe formed -- and shares how physicists in labs around the world are coming up with creative ways to study it.

Do you ever think about what would happen

if the world were a little bit different?

How your life would be different

if you were born 5,000 years from now

instead of today?

How history would be different

if the continents
were at different latitudes

or how life in the Solar system
would have developed

if the Sun were 10 percent larger.

Well, playing with these
kinds of possibilities

is what I get to do for a living

but with the entire universe.

I make model universes in a computer.

Digital universes that have
different starting points

and are made of different amounts
of different kinds of material.

And then I compare
these universes to our own

to see what it is made of
and how it evolved.

This process of testing models
with measurements of the sky

has taught us a huge amount
about our universe so far.

One of the strangest
things we have learned

is that most of the material
in the universe

is made of something
entirely different than you and me.

But without it,

the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.

Everything we can see with telescopes

makes up just about 15 percent
of the total mass in the universe.

Everything else, 85 percent of it,

doesn't emit or absorb light.

We can't see it with our eyes,

we can't detect it with radio waves

or microwaves or any other kind of light.

But we know it is there

because of its influence
on what we can see.

It's a little bit like,

if you wanted to map
the surface of our planet

and everything on it

using this picture of the Earth
from space at night.

You get some clues
from where the light is,

but there's a lot that you can't see,

everything from people
to mountain ranges.

And you have to infer what is there
from these limited clues.

We call this unseen stuff "dark matter."

Now, a lot of people
have heard of dark matter,

but even if you have heard of it,

it probably seems abstract,

far away, probably even irrelevant.

Well, the interesting thing is,

dark matter is all around us

and probably right here.

In fact, dark matter particles

are probably going through
your body right now

as you sit in this room.

Because we are on Earth

and Earth is spinning around the Sun,

and the Sun is hurtling through our galaxy

at about half a million miles per hour.

But dark matter doesn't bump into us,

it just goes right through us.

So how do we figure out more about this?

What is it,

and what does it have to do
with our existence?

Well, in order to figure out
how we came to be,

we first need to understand
how our galaxy came to be.

This is a picture of our galaxy,
the Milky Way, today.

What did it look like
10 billion years in the past

or what would it look like
10 billion years in the future?

What about the stories

of the hundreds of millions
of other galaxies

that we've already mapped out
with large surveys of the sky?

How would their histories be different

if the universe was made of something else

or if there was more or less matter in it?

So the interesting thing
about these model universes

is that they allow us
to test these possibilities.

Let's go back to the first
moment of the universe --

just a fraction of a second
after the big bang.

In this first moment,

there was no matter at all.

The universe was expanding very fast.

And quantum mechanics tells us

that matter is being created and destroyed

all the time, in every moment.

At this time, the universe
was expanding so fast

that the matter that got created
couldn't get destroyed.

And thus we think that all of the matter
was created during this time.

Both the dark matter

and the regular matter
that makes up you and me.

Now, let's go a little bit further

to a time after the matter was created,

after protons and neutrons formed,

after hydrogen formed,

about 400,000 years after the big bang.

The universe was hot and dense
and really smooth

but not perfectly smooth.

This image, taken with a space telescope
called the Planck satellite,

shows us the temperature of the universe

in all directions.

And what we see

is that there were places
that were a little bit hotter

and denser than others.

The spots in this image

represent places where there was
more or less mass in the early universe.

Those spots got big because of gravity.

The universe was expanding
and getting less dense overall

over the last 13.8 billion years.

But gravity worked hard in those spots

where there was a little bit more mass

and pulled more and more mass
into those regions.

Now, all of this
is a little hard to imagine,

so let me just show you
what I am talking about.

Those computer models I mentioned
allow us to test these ideas,

so let's take a look at one of them.

This movie, made by my research group,

shows us what happened to the universe
after its earliest moments.

You see the universe
started out pretty smooth,

but there were some regions

where there was
a little bit more material.

Gravity turned on
and brought more and more mass

into those spots that started out
with a little bit extra.

Over time,

you get enough stuff in one place

that the hydrogen gas,

which was initially well mixed
with the dark matter,

starts to separate from it,

cool down, form stars,

and you get a small galaxy.

Over time, over billions
and billions of years,

those small galaxies crash into each other

and merge and grow
to become larger galaxies,

like our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Now, what happens
if you don't have dark matter?

If you don't have dark matter,

those spots never get clumpy enough.

It turns out, you need at least
a million times the mass of the Sun

in one dense region,

before you can start forming stars.

And without dark matter,

you never get enough stuff in one place.

So here, we're looking
at two universes, side by side.

In one of them you can see

that things get clumpy quickly.

In that universe,

it's really easy to form galaxies.

In the other universe,

the things that start out
like small clumps,

they just stay really small.

Not very much happens.

In that universe,
you wouldn't get our galaxy.

Or any other galaxy.

You wouldn't get the Milky Way,

you wouldn't get the Sun,

you wouldn't get us.

We just couldn't exist in that universe.

OK, so this crazy stuff, dark matter,

it's most of the mass in the universe,

it's going through us right now,
we wouldn't be here without it.

What is it?

Well, we have no idea.

(Laughter)

But we have a lot of educated guesses,

and a lot of ideas
for how to find out more.

So, most physicists think
that dark matter is a particle,

similar in many ways to the subatomic
particles that we know of,

like protons and neutrons and electrons.

Whatever it is,

it behaves very similarly
with respect to gravity.

But it doesn't emit or absorb light,

and it goes right through normal matter,

as if it wasn't even there.

We'd like to know what particle it is.

For example, how heavy is it?

Or, does anything at all happen
if it interacts with normal matter?

Physicists have lots of great ideas
for what it could be,

they're very creative.

But it's really hard,

because those ideas span a huge range.

It could be as small
as the smallest subatomic particles,

or it could be as large
as the mass of 100 Suns.

So, how do we figure out what it is?

Well, physicists and astronomers

have a lot of ways
to look for dark matter.

One of the things we're doing
is building sensitive detectors

in deep underground mines,

waiting for the possibility

that a dark matter particle,
which goes through us and the Earth,

would hit a denser material

and leave behind
some trace of its passage.

We're looking for dark matter in the sky,

for the possibility
that dark matter particles

would crash into each other

and create high-energy light
that we could see

with special gamma-ray telescopes.

We're even trying to make
dark matter here on Earth,

by smashing particles together
and looking for what happens,

using the Large Hadron
Collider in Switzerland.

Now, so far,

all of these experiments
have taught us a lot

about what dark matter isn't

(Laughter)

but not yet what it is.

There were really good ideas
that dark matter could have been,

that these experiments would have seen.

And they didn't see them yet,

so we have to keep looking
and thinking harder.

Now, another way to get a clue
to what dark matter is

is to study galaxies.

We already talked about

how our galaxy and many other galaxies
wouldn't even be here

without dark matter.

Those models also make predictions

for many other things about galaxies:

How they're distributed in the universe,

how they move,

how they evolve over time.

And we can test those predictions
with observations of the sky.

So let me just give you two examples

of these kinds of measurements
we can make with galaxies.

The first is that we can make
maps of the universe with galaxies.

I am part of a survey
called the Dark Energy Survey,

which has made the largest map
of the universe so far.

We measured the positions and shapes
of 100 million galaxies

over one-eighth of the sky.

And this map is showing us all the matter
in this region of the sky,

which is inferred by the light
distorted from these 100 million galaxies.

The light distorted from all of the matter

that was between those galaxies and us.

The gravity of the matter is strong enough
to bend the path of light.

And it gives us this image.

So these kinds of maps

can tell us about how much
dark matter there is,

they also tell us where it is

and how it changes over time.

So we're trying to learn
about what the universe is made of

on the very largest scales.

It turns out that the tiniest
galaxies in the universe

provide some of the best clues.

So why is that?

Here are two example simulated universes

with two different kinds of dark matter.

Both of these pictures
are showing you a region

around a galaxy like the Milky Way.

And you can see that there's a lot
of other material around it,

little small clumps.

Now, in the image on the right,

dark matter particles are moving slower
than they are in the one on the left.

If those dark matter particles
are moving really fast,

then the gravity in small clumps
is not strong enough

to slow those fast particles down.

And they keep going.

They never collapse
into these small clumps.

So you end up with fewer of them
than in the universe on the right.

If you don't have those small clumps,

then you get fewer small galaxies.

If you look up at the southern sky,

you can actually see
two of these small galaxies,

the largest of the small galaxies
that are orbiting our Milky Way,

the Large Magellanic Cloud
and the Small Magellanic Cloud.

In the last several years,

we have detected a whole bunch more
even smaller galaxies.

This is an example of one of them

that we detected
with the same dark energy survey

that we used to make maps of the universe.

These really small galaxies,

some of them are extremely small.

Some of them have as few
as a few hundred stars,

compared to the few hundred
billion stars in our Milky Way.

So that makes them really hard to find.

But in the last decade,

we've actually found
a whole bunch more of these.

We now know of 60 of these tiny galaxies

that are orbiting our own Milky Way.

And these little guys
are a big clue to dark matter.

Because just the existence
of these galaxies tells us

that dark matter
can't be moving very fast,

and not much can be happening
when it runs into normal matter.

In the next several years,

we're going to make much more
precise maps of the sky.

And those will help refine our movies

of the whole universe
and the entire galaxy.

Physicists are also making new,
more sensitive experiments

to try to catch some sign
of dark matter in their laboratories.

Dark matter is still a huge mystery.

But it's a really exciting time
to be working on it.

We have really clear evidence it exists.

From the scale of the smallest galaxies

to the scale of the whole universe.

Will we actually find it
and figure out what it is?

I have no idea.

But it's going to be
a lot of fun to find out.

We have a lot of possibilities
for discovery,

and we definitely will learn more
about what it is doing

and about what it isn't.

Regardless of whether we find
that particle anytime soon,

I hope I have convinced you

that this mystery is actually
really close to home.

The search for dark matter

may just be the key to a whole new
understanding of physics

and our place in the universe.

Thank you.

(Applause)