I have borrowed the name of the editorial from the title of astronomer Fred Watson's talk to a combined PLDA/IALD meeting in Sydney in late November. Fred's secrets, two of them, were huge - astronomically huge. And they were both dark because neither was visible nor directly detectable. They are called dark matter and dark energy and have been postulated to make the universe work with the known laws of physics. Dark matter forms 23% of the universe while the dark energy needed to fit with the theories makes up 73%. That means that the observable universe - all the objects we can see - is only 4% of what's there. Dark matter, it seems, has been detected indirectly, due to its gravitational effect on light but the dark energy remains, as US documentaries always say, a mystery. Fred did suggest that dark matter might be better understood from the work being done at the Large Hadron Collider, recently completed for CERN. Heady stuff, extremely well presented in Fred's well-honed talk.
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