Dark Matter Animated: The Next Frontier of Discovery for Physicists and Cosmologists

We final­ly got the big announce­ment. After decades of work, physi­cists have pinned down the Hig­gs Boson. It’s a major mile­stone. But physi­cists at CERN won’t be left with noth­ing to do. The same folks at PhD Comics who gave us this help­ful primer that uses ani­ma­tion to explain the Hig­gs Boson have also pro­duced a com­pan­ion video on Dark Mat­ter, the mys­te­ri­ous stuff being researched by CERN sci­en­tists and their Large Hadron Col­lid­er.

In the clip above, physi­cists Daniel White­son and Jonathan Feng under­score how much of the uni­verse remains dark to us. We under­stand about 5% of what makes up the cos­mos. Anoth­er 75%, we call Dark Ener­gy, the oth­er 20%, Dark Mat­ter, which are pos­si­bly man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same thing (or pos­si­bly not). Research on Hig­gs Boson will tell us some­thing impor­tant about the ori­gin of mass in the uni­verse. But whether any of this will help explain Dark Mat­ter (which accounts for most of the mat­ter in the uni­verse and behaves dif­fer­ent­ly than the mass we under­stand — it nei­ther emits nor absorbs light) — that’s anoth­er big ques­tion.