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...