The cosmos doesn’t work to my research schedule – but that’s OK

I work on the dark matter problem knowing the questions I have may be answered long after I die. This is the life I signed up for: to think about interesting ideas and hopefully find out whether any of them are correct, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

IT HAS been almost a century since Fritz Zwicky first hypothesised the existence of dunkle materie – which translates to “dark matter” in English. In 1933, looking at observations of galaxy clusters, he noted that there seemed to be a mismatch between the mass indicated by the motions of the galaxies and the mass measured by how much light the galaxies were radiating.

About 30 years later, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford used observations of stars orbiting their galactic centres to truly substantiate this mystery: there was more matter than we could see, suggesting a kind of invisible particle was …