The Absurd Search For Dark Matter

This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via https://brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription. Astronomers think there should be 5 times as much dark matter as ordinary matter – a shadow universe that makes up most of the mass in the universe. But after decades of trying, no experiments have found any trace of dark matter – except one.

A massive thanks to the wonderful people at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Physics https://www.centredarkmatter.org for showing us around and being on camera – Fleur Morrison, A/Prof Phillip Urquijo, Prof Elisabetta Barberio, Madeleine Zurowski and Grace Lawrence.
Thanks to Leo Fincher-Johnson and everyone at the Stawell gold mine for having us.
Massive thanks to Prof. Geraint Lewis – Geraint has been Veritasium’s go-to expert for anything astrophysics and cosmology related. Please check out his website, and buy his books, they’re great – https://www.geraintflewis.com
Thanks to Prof. Timothy Tait for the help to make sure we got the science right.
Thanks to Ingo Berg for illustrating the effect of dark matter on the rotation of a galaxy https://beltoforion.de/en/spiral_galaxy_renderer/spiral-galaxy-renderer.html

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Galaxy cluster simulation from IllustrisTNG – https://www.tng-project.org
Venn Diagram of Dark Matter from Tim Tait – https://ve42.co/venn
The Bullet Cluster Image from Magellan, Hubble and Chandra telescopes – https://ve42.co/BC2
Bullet cluster animation from Andrew Robertson / Institute for Computational Cosmology / Durham University – https://ve42.co/BC3

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Bernabei, R., Belli, P., Cappella, F., Cerulli, R., Dai, C. J., d’Angelo, A., ... & Ye, Z. P. (2008). First results from DAMA/LIBRA and the combined results with DAMA/NaI. The European Physical Journal C, 56(3), 333-355. – https://ve42.co/DAMA2008

Zwicky, F. (1933). Die rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen nebeln. Helvetica physica acta, 6, 110-127. – https://ve42.co/Zwicky1

Zwicky, F. (1937). On the Masses of Nebulae and of Clusters of Nebulae. The Astrophysical Journal, 86, 217. – https://ve42.co/Zwicky2

Rubin, V. C., & Ford Jr, W. K. (1970). Rotation of the Andromeda nebula from a spectroscopic survey of emission regions. The Astrophysical Journal, 159, 379. – https://ve42.co/Rubin1

Bosma, A., & Van der Kruit, P. C. (1979). The local mass-to-light ratio in spiral galaxies. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 79, 281-286. – https://ve42.co/Bosma1

Milgrom, M. (1983). A modification of the Newtonian dynamics as a possible alternative to the hidden mass hypothesis. The Astrophysical Journal, 270, 365-370. – https://ve42.co/mond1

Sanders, R. H., & McGaugh, S. S. (2002). Modified Newtonian dynamics as an alternative to dark matter. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 40(1), 263-317. – https://ve42.co/Mond2

M. Markevitch; A. H. Gonzalez; D. Clowe; A. Vikhlinin; L. David; W. Forman; C. Jones; S. Murray & W. Tucker (2004). "Direct constraints on the dark matter self-interaction cross-section from the merging galaxy cluster 1E0657-56". Astrophys. J. 606 (2): 819–824. – https://ve42.co/BC1

Great website about the CMB – http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/intermediate/driving2.html

Galli, S., Iocco, F., Bertone, G., & Melchiorri, A. (2009). CMB constraints on dark matter models with large annihilation cross section. Physical Review D, 80(2), 023505. – https://ve42.co/CMB1

Antonello, M., Barberio, E., Baroncelli, T., Benziger, J., Bignell, L. J., Bolognino, I., ... & Xu, J. (2019). The SABRE project and the SABRE Proof-of-Principle. The European Physical Journal C, 79(4), 1-8. – https://ve42.co/SABRE1


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Written by Derek Muller and Petr Lebedev
Edited by Trenton Oliver
Animation by Ivy Tello and Mike Radjabov
Filmed by Derek Muller and Petr Lebedev
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Image
B-roll supplied by Stawell Gold Mine
Music from Epidemic Sound
Thumbnail by Ignat Berbeci
Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, and Emily Zhang