The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe, from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars, constitute only 5% of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The remaining 95% is made up of a recipe of 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy, both nonluminous components whose nature remains a mystery. Freese will recount the stories of the dark matter puzzle, starting with the discoveries of visionary scientists from the 1930s who first proposed its existence, to Vera Rubin in the 1970s whose observations conclusively showed its dominance in galaxies, to the deluge of data today from underground laboratories, satellites in space, and the Large Hadron Collider. Theorists contend that dark matter most likely consists of new fundamental particles; the best candidates include WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), axions, light or fuzzy dark matter, or even primordial black holes. Billions of them pass through our bodies every second without us even realizing it, yet their gravitational pull is capable of whirling stars and gas at breakneck speeds around the centers of galaxies, and bending light from distant bright objects. In this talk Freese will provide an overview of this cosmic cocktail, including the evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. She will also talk about Dark Stars, early stars powered by dark matter, that may have already been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. Solving the dark matter mystery will be an epochal moment in humankind's quest to understand the universe.
Bio:
Katherine Freese is the Director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Texas Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (TCCAP) at the University of Texas, Austin, where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair and serves as a Professor of Physics. Freese earned her B.A. in Physics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago. She has held positions at the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and served as director of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. Freese's accolades include the 2021 University of Chicago Alumni Professional Achievement Award, membership in the National Academy of Sciences from 2020, and the 2019 Julian Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society. Her research, which has garnered nearly 20,000 citations, focuses on dark matter and cosmology. Freese has delivered over 375 invited talks globally and authored the book "The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter." Her work has been featured in major media outlets like the New York Times and Scientific American, and she has made numerous appearances on TV and radio, including BBC and PBS.