Monday, December 2Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Tag: dark matter

The Hunt for the Unseen
Science & Technology

The Hunt for the Unseen

Throughout it’s history, the human race has delved far into the mysteries of the Universe: why are we here? Where did the Universe come from? What is the Universe made of? These questions have sparked interest and exploration for millennia, and we have come a very long way in that time. It has been approximately 2500 years since the Ancient Greeks started to formulate their ideas about the Universe we live in. Since then the human race has become to probe the true nature of the Universe itself to answer these questions, and it is the final question that has the whole physics community stumped: what is the Universe made from? An experiment named WMAP measured the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation of the Universe, which is made from photons that have been travelling since the be...
International Dark Matter Day
Science & Technology

International Dark Matter Day

On Monday 30 October, the Physics Department at Royal Holloway celebrated International Dark Matter Day 2017 with an evening of events. The event was hugely attended, with more than 500 people registered online and Windsor Auditorium packed for the evening’s first event, a lecture given by Dr Jocelyn Monroe. With dark matter now estimated to make up a quarter of the matter in the universe, the theory was first proposed in the 1930s when the observed rotation speeds of nearby galaxies was found to be too fast to account for the visible mass of the stars and planets them. Confirmation of its existence came in the Cosmic Microwave Background in the 2000s and even more recently in observations of gravitational lensing – where light in bent around some huge invisible mass and a magnified ima...