Dark Matter In The Pub 2024 - The Invisible Mystery

Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol49 Issue38 30 September–4 October 2024

Dark Matter in the Pub is an entertaining science outreach event that aims to bring together scientists and the wider community to explore the fascinating and mysterious topic of dark matter. The first event of this series that took place in a small pub in Canberra in 2022 was a great success. This year, the event was moved to larger pubs hosting more audience, and in two Australian cities. In a series of short, interactive, and entertaining presentations, Centre scientists Ellen Sirks, Theresa Fruth, Ciaran O’Hare, Laura Manenti, Ben McAllister and Zuzana Slavkovska aimed to draw the nation’s attention towards dark matter research by presenting different aspects of their research into dark matter.

This year’s events were hosted by Phil Dooley, a successful  science communicator who enriched his performance by live music with lyrics motivated by science. As a part of the event, a pub quiz was organized to engage the participants in the sciences, incentivised with small prizes. There were several interactive demonstrations that directly engaged the audience with science. For example, the visitors could pretend to be massive objects in the Universe and lens the light from background galaxies resulting in all kinds of odd distortions using a gravitational lensing demo. 

The event received positive feedback. In the next event series, more Australian cities are planned to be involved. Recordings of the full events from Canberra and Sydney, as well as a Highlight video are available here: