BBC Sky at Night

Q&A WITH A DARK MATTER DETECTIVE

What is dark matter and why is it called ‘dark’?

We have evidence suggesting that there should be a certain amount of mass in the Universe, but this mass cannot be observed directly. Even in early works from the 1920s, astronomers knew that in order to explain how fast some galaxies move there needed to be more mass than we could account for. An astronomer called Fritz Zwicky came

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