Science Café – Our Dark (Matter) Universe

Dark forces are afoot in the universe!  The stars in our galaxy are rotating faster than originally expected. Galaxy clusters collide in unusual ways. The photons originating from the first milliseconds of our universe move as if the space is filled with something we cannot see but they can feel. This unseen substance is called dark matter and it makes up a quarter of the energy budget of our universe. But what is it? Is it similar to electrons and protons? Does it interact with the electromagnetic force or other forces? We know dark matter exists but we do not know the answers to these and other questions about its origins. I will present our current theoretical understanding about dark matter (and other dark forces) and will discuss how we are searching for it. Our journey for discovering dark matter will go from the mines in Sudbury to the center of our galaxy and to galaxies far far away, and will span all ages of our universe’s 13.7 billion years old history.

About the presenter:

Seyda Ipek is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics at Carleton University. She  received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2015. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab and then at the University of California Irvine as a University of California President’s Fellow. Her research addresses the problems with the Standard Model, focusing on the matter–antimatter asymmetry of our Universe, the particle nature of dark matter and the origin of neutrino masses.

For more information, visit https://seydaipek.com/