By By ALLISSA CORAK
acorak@umail.iu.edu
Oct. 31 is International Dark Matter Day, and you can bet the IU South Bend Physics Department will take part.
The university will be just one of 50 institutions across the nation having a hand in celebrating the unknown.
During the Dark Matter Day event hosted by the department, three short talks from IUSB professors will take place and the discussion will continue with a panel. Experts like Dr. Adam Martin from Notre Dame and Dr. John Beacom from Ohio State University, are slated to answer any and all questions related to dark matter.
What is dark matter anyway? According to the event’s website, dark matter makes up roughly 26.8 percent of the total mass and energy in the universe—but it isn’t well understood.
“There’s more to the universe than stars, planets, asteroids, comets and space dust. In fact, there’s a lot more to the universe that we can’t yet explain,” reads the description from DarkMatterDay.com.
Although there is more to learn about the mysterious material, IUSB’s Physics Department has already made lengthy strides in research.
In February of 2017, IUSB physics professor and principal investigator IIan Levine and his team were recognized for design and fabrication of acoustic sensors for The PICO Dark Matter Search Experiment, per the university.
Levine’s personal research website states that the IUSB team is also “helping to understand the acoustic properties of the detectors for the purpose of improving our ability to distinguish spurious events from real events and to reconstruct the precise location of the events within the detector.”
During the event on Halloween, the talks will hit on Levine’s research, speculations about dark matter, and why scientists believe it exists.
All students and community members are welcome to attend the event in The Grill starting at 7 p.m.
