An interview with Prof. Erez Etzion, Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University. Tel Aviv 360 podcast of Tel Aviv University
Prof. Erez Etzion, experimental physicist and head of the School of Physics and Astronomy opens for us a window into the unknown world of elementary particles. Dark matter is one of the great mysteries of physicists nowadays, they assume it exists, see its effect on stars and galaxies but despite its prevalence it has never been seen in the laboratory.
About 300 years ago, Newton discovered the force of gravity and used it to explain simply the apple that fell on his head, the rotation of the moon around the earth, and the orbits of the stars around the sun.
But when you try to calculate, you see that the amount of visible matter in the universe cannot explain why the stars do not escape from the galaxies and why the galaxies rotate as they do.
Physicists estimate that an enormous amount of matter, five times the amount of normal matter, is missing to quantitatively explain the gravitational forces in the galaxies and galaxy clusters that make up the universe.
This missing matter is called dark matter. In an attempt to understand its essence, Prof. Etzion and his colleagues embarked on a journey to discover interactions in the laboratory between the dark matter and the matter known to us. Since there is more hidden than visible, the search spans a wide playground and a variety of tools: from the particle accelerator at CERN, through experiments deep in the earth's crust to experiments in tiny spaceships.
Listen to the Tel Aviv 360 podcast of Tel Aviv University hosted by Michael Miro
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Comments
It seems that there are no respondents to the comment,, this is also a big mystery...
Perhaps there is a possibility that the dark matter is like an iceberg submerged in water, only 8 percent of it, less rich than the glacier, is above the surface of the water. The meaning is that most of the dark matter is found in dimensions that are not visible to us when the gravity of dark matter is expressed in our dimensions, therefore there is no possibility of discovering it, of course this is speculation, I would be happy to read learned responses