THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE


by Professor Rolf-Peter Kudritzki
Director, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
Friday, July 5, 2001


Astronomy tries to explore the universe and to understand our place within it. During the past decades many exciting detections have revolutionized our view. We have learned about the birth and the evolution of the universe and about galaxies as its building blocks, which formed shortly after the Big Bang. Looking closer into galaxies, we are witnessing the life cycles of stars which are born in dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust and die in spectacular supernova explosions or more quietly as white Dwarfs illuminating surrounding gaseous nebulae. Many of these stars form protoplanetary disks while they are in the process of birth, and are later surrounded by orbiting planets similar to our own planetary system.

After all this progress one might get the impression that astronomy has come to an end and that "everything is understood." The contrary is true. It was a big surprise to the astronomers in the world, when it became clear that whatever we have detected so far in the universe -- galaxies, stars, interstellar gas, etc. -- is just the tip of the iceberg and comprises only ten percent of all the matter in the universe. the rest is "Dark Matter."

We are not able to see it, but we know that it is there, because it causes gravitational attraction. It is the gravitational glue, which keeps galaxies and galaxy clusters together and which is responsible for the large scale structure of the universe.

The talk will introduce the different observational methods investigating galaxies and galaxy clusters to verity the existence of Dark Matter as the dominant source of gravity in the universe. It will describe a recent research project using the largest ground-based telescopes in the world to identify the physical nature of Dark Matter. The project failed to be successful, but it made very interesting new detections, which were unexpected. In this way, the talk gives insight into the world of modern astronomical research and the challenge to understand our universe.
 

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 Dark Matters