The Evans Family Beyond Lecture: The Oldest Light and the Darkest Matter

The Oldest Light and the Darkest Matter: Irvine's Search for the Invisible Universe

Kevork N. Abazajian, Professor of Physics & Astronomy

The visible universe is vast beyond intuition. It contains a trillion galaxies, and the light now reaching our telescopes has traveled more than thirteen billion years. And yet everything we can see accounts for only five percent of what exists. The rest has never been seen, only measured. That tradition of measuring the unmeasurable began at UC Irvine with Fred Reines, whose detection of the neutrino, a particle once thought undetectable, earned the Nobel Prize. I will trace that lineage to the present: our searches for dark matter using X-ray observatories and the James Webb Space Telescope, why two excellent measurements of the Universe's expansion rate disagree with one another, and how cosmology now weighs the ghostly neutrino itself. I will describe the deepest puzzles that remain, and the Irvine theorists working to solve them.

Light refreshments will be provided during the reception.

For questions, please contact physicalsciences@uci.edu.

The Ruth Ann and John Evans Family Beyond Lecture invites you into the minds of visionary researchers who are decoding the universe's deepest enigmas and igniting curiosity in future scientific pioneers. The annual series offers timely scientific lectures that are free and open to the public.