• Question: What is dark matter?

    Asked by dumhead456 to Hermine, Katy, Laura, Nathalie, Paula on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Dark Matter is a 2007 film directed by Shi-Zheng Chen and starring Meryl Streep, Ye Lui and Aidan Quinn. The story is centred on Cosmology graduate Liu Xing, a scholarship boy from China who has newly arrived in Salt Lake City to study in Professor Reiser’s prestigious program. All the students in the program work on projects that extend and further Professor reiser’s model of the origins of the universe. Liu Xing does well until his own theories move him away from Reiser’s………Will Reiser and the Department recognise Liu Xing’s brilliance? And can the young man’s benefactor (Meryl Streep), intercede?

      The film is loosely inspired by the true story of Gang Lu, a Chinese physics student in the US…..but I won’t tell you what happened to him (in real life) as it will spoil the film!

    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hi again,

      Dark matter is a type of matter we can not see (yet postulating its existence is crucial to our current understanding of the universe dynamic), and whose composition is unknown. Basically, answering this question is one of the hottest topic in astronomy, cosmology and astrophysics 🙂

    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Another great question!

      Basically, dark matter is the amount of mass that is deduced to exist due to gravitational and galaxy rotation observed patterns but is not detectable as “matter”. It has never been detected and there are many theories on what it could be, but none is convincing enough.

      So, it’s still a mystery. 😉

    • Photo: Laura Dixon

      Laura Dixon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      The opposite of light matter? lol
      I’ll cheat and refer you to this wikipedia page since its explained there much better than I could do!
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

      🙂

    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Dark matter is something we cannot see and is believed to account for certain descripencies that we see in measurements of galaxies. Where certain radiation can be detected and gravitational effects can be seen to act upon an object or galaxy. It is believed that dark matter takes a large % of the universe.

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