From Dr. Becky.
How do we actually detect dark matter? Matter that doesn’t give out light, doesn’t reflect light, doesn’t absorb light: nothing. The only reason we know its there and have so much evidence for its existence is because of our observations with telescopes when we see its gravitational pull and effect on other objects in space. But if we want to physically detect some dark matter and say *this* thing here is dark matter, and this is what it’s actually made of, and this is its size and mass, how we do we do that when all our “detectors” use light to know something is there? Well what about using the James Webb Space Telescope? What if instead of using it as a telescope, we could use it as direct detector of dark matter…
Du et al. (2025) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13131
Astrobites coverage of the reserach – https://astrobites.org/2025/08/11/jwst-dark-matter-search/
Alpine et al (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12084
Sadoulet et al. (2024) – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0550321324000750?via%3Dihub
00:00 Introduction
01:28 The search for dark matter so far
03:03 Why use JWST
06:28 What JWST found
08:46 What next?
10:31 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
