Home PBS Space Time Season 2023 Episode 21

Do We Need a NEW Dark Matter Model?

PBS Space Time · Season 2023 · Episode 21
We have no idea what dark matter is, other than it’s some source of gravity that is completely invisible but exerts way more pull that all of the regular matter. More than all of the stars, all of the gas, all of the black holes…unless dark matter is black holes, then black holes are most of everything. Dark matter constitutes 80% or so of the mass in the universe, which means even our Milky Way galaxy is mostly a vast ball of dark matter that happens to have attracted a relative sprinkling of baryons—atoms in the form of gas, which lit up as starry glitter spinning in the middle of this invisible gravitational well.

Episode Details

Air date, runtime, timezone, and episode position.

Season
2023
Episode
21
Air Date
02/Aug/2023
Air Time
12:00
Runtime
17 min

Overview

Episode summary.

We have no idea what dark matter is, other than it’s some source of gravity that is completely invisible but exerts way more pull that all of the regular matter. More than all of the stars, all of the gas, all of the black holes…unless dark matter is black holes, then black holes are most of everything. Dark matter constitutes 80% or so of the mass in the universe, which means even our Milky Way galaxy is mostly a vast ball of dark matter that happens to have attracted a relative sprinkling of baryons—atoms in the form of gas, which lit up as starry glitter spinning in the middle of this invisible gravitational well.

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