I'm Flora Lichten.

And I'm Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today on the podcast is our model of the universe broken.

So it could be very broken or a little broken.

All options right now are on the table.

We're going to start with some simple questions like, how old is the universe? Simple, right? How did it form?

Astronomers and physicists starting way back with Einstein have filled up lots of chalkboards

trying to model the universe, tweaking the model with each new discovery. Expanding universe? That's no

problem. We'll put in the cosmological constant to take care of that.

Wait, the expansion is accelerating.

The constant is not constant.

And if it's accelerating even faster than we predicted, uh-oh.

Houston, we may have a problem.

But there's more.

It seems that dark matter may be stranger than we thought.

Dark energy is behaving strangely. Strange radio signals have been detected coming through the ice in Antarctica.

And wait, they found the missing matter. The normal stuff, not all that dark stuff, the stuff that's been missing all these years.

What the heck is going on here? We start the hour by talking about why some cosmologists

are saying it may be time for a standard model overhaul. And here to comb the cosmos and

massage the matter are my guests. Wendy Friedman, professor of astronomy and astrophysics

at the University of Chicago, and Dan Skullnick, Associate Professor of Physics at Duke University

in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having us. Nice to have you.

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