Light &amp; Dark. Dark

Light & Dark. Dark

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Description

The first hints that there might be more out there than meets the eye emerged from the gloom in 1846 with the discovery of the planet Neptune. At four billion kilometers from the sun there was precious little light to illuminate it and, like 89 per cent of all the atoms in the universe, it gives off almost no light. In the middle of the 20th century scientists discovered something even stranger - dark matter. In fact, to explain how galaxies are held together and how they formed in the first place, there needed to be four times as much dark matter as there was normal atomic matter. In the late 1990s scientists discovered dark energy, a new force driving the universe apart that is thought to make up 73% of it. Prof. Jim Al-Khalili explores the quest to uncover the nature of dark energy and to see dark matter pull the first stars and galaxies together, a quest that involves peering into the darkest period in the cosmos's past.