Professor Jo Dunkley
University of Oxford

By making detailed observations of the Universe, we have discovered that familiar atoms only make up a small fraction of everything that is out there. Most of it we don’t yet understand. We think that about a quarter of the universe is made of Dark Matter, a name we use to describe invisible matter that feels the effect of gravity, likely an undiscovered new type of particle. The other 70% is something we call Dark Energy, odd stuff that has the strange effect of making the expansion of the universe speed up. This talk will introduce these mysterious ingredients of space, and describe how their nature might be discovered using large international experiments.