Dark Matter, Cosmic Background Radiation, and the Birth of the First Stars

  • Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

February 16, 2024 3:30 PM

Host:
Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine
Presenter:
Dr. Tracy Slatyer (MIT)
Video Recording
84% of the matter in the universe is "dark", presently invisible to us except through its gravitational interactions. However, even tiny interactions between dark and visible matter could have striking effects on the primordial history of our universe, and leave distinctive traces of their existence in the low-energy background photons that pervade the cosmos. I will present recent work mapping out the space of such signals that could be produced by dark matter decay and annihilation, and furthermore discuss how such energy injections could influence the formation of the first stars in the universe.

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