You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quang here with Shortwave Producer Rebecca Rumirez.

Hi, lady. Hello! What you got for us today?

Well, Emily, as you know, I'm kind of in love with the mysteries of our universe and how

little we know about the universe. Ooh, are we playing an outer space today?

Everywhere, because I want to talk to you about dark matter, which is all around us.

Okay, dark matter. What is that? So there's regular matter. All the things that are visible to you

and me, the clothes you're using to soundproof your closet for recording, all the stars, planets,

you get the idea. And scientists like Priyambada Natharajan, a professor of astronomy and physics

over at Yale say all of that is only somewhere around four to five percent of our universe.

So it's just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the bulk of the matter in the universe is actually

dark matter that is invisible to us. And the reason that it's invisible to us is because it doesn't

interact with light in any way at all. Hence, it's all around us, possibly even occasionally floating

through us. And you didn't realize because you can't see it. And because scientists like Priya

think it doesn't really interact with normal matter either. Yes, I remember Priya from our Black

Holes episode. Yeah, she was great. And you know, this four to five percent number, I don't know

about you, but it's just so humbling every time I think about it. We are so anthropocentric,

like we believe that we're so important and so significant in the grand scheme of things.

I think it's a very sobering humbling kind of number to keep track of, that everything that we

can see and perceive is just like a tiny fraction. Wow, I'm ready. I'm ready to be humbled by dark

matter and leave it to you to immediately wax poetic about something humanity knows very little

about. It is real and scientists like Priya are able to study dark matter indirectly, doing lots

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