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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days starting January 23, 2008. I'm Steve Merski. This week,

a walk on the dark side. We're going to hear about dark matter from Caltech astronomer Josh

Simon. Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some recent science in the news. The annual meeting of the

American Astronomical Society took place earlier this month in Austin, Texas. Scientific Americans expert astronomy editor George Musser attended, and he got a chance to speak

with Josh Simon, the Robert Milliken Fellow, to oil drop a name, at the California Institute

of Technology.

You've got your regular matter and your dark matter, which physicists and astronomers think

makes up most of the stuff in the universe.

Of course, we're not even talking about the dark energy here.

For a two-page primer on the whole dark matter, dark energy situation, you can check out a

Siam Ask the Experts feature we ran back in August of 2006.

It's at tiny URL.com slash 27G 9op.

Or just jump right in with the upcoming interview.

Anyway, the dark matter can't be seen, that's why they call it dark, but it can be divided

into the hot dark matter and the cold dark matter.

The hot dark matter would be particles traveling super fast and would explain how big clusters of galaxies could have formed, but because the particles go so fast it cannot explain how individual galaxies got a chance to form. For that, you need the cold dark matter. This chilly dark matter would move slowly enough to allow individual galaxies to clump together. But the cold dark matter hypothesis faces some conflict with observations.

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