Columbia Researchers Lead Race to Find Dark Matter
Monday, July 27, 2009 - 14:42
in Physics & Chemistry
(PhysOrg.com) -- Inside a mountain range in central Italy, Columbia researchers are trying to solve one of the most pressing questions in modern physics: What is dark matter? The riddle has obsessed astronomers and physicists since the 1930s, when Caltech professor Fritz Zwicky first predicted its existence. Because dark matter neither emits nor reflects light and cannot be directly observed, no one has ever proven that it exists; yet theories show it makes up as much as a quarter of the universe. Columbia physics professor Elena Aprile, with collaborators from universities around the world, including Rice University and UCLA, is leading the race to find and identify dark matter for the first time.