Beyond Lecture: The Oldest Light and the Darkest Matter

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The Oldest Light and the Darkest Matter: Irvine's Search for the Invisible Universe

Kevork N. Abazajian, Professor of Physics & Astronomy

The visible universe is vast beyond intuition. It contains a trillion galaxies, and the light now reaching our telescopes has traveled more than thirteen billion years. And yet everything we can see accounts for only five percent of what exists. The rest has never been seen, only measured. That tradition of measuring the unmeasurable began at UC Irvine with Fred Reines, whose detection of the neutrino, a particle once thought undetectable, earned the Nobel Prize. I will trace that lineage to the present: our searches for dark matter using X-ray observatories and the James Webb Space Telescope, why two excellent measurements of the Universe's expansion rate disagree with one another, and how cosmology now weighs the ghostly neutrino itself. I will describe the deepest puzzles that remain, and the Irvine theorists working to solve them.

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