The Museum of Science and the Cosmos (MCC) in Tenerife will hold a free public talk on Thursday, 29 October at 17:30, bringing together four researchers to weigh three competing explanations for dark matter, Diario de Tenerife reports. The session, titled "The Battle of Dark Matter: Three Theories, One Mystery," is open to the public until capacity is reached. It is run by the MCC, which sits under the Cabildo de Tenerife's autonomous body for museums and centres (OAMC).
According to Diario de Tenerife, the event is organised with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) through its cross-cutting Dark Matter line, and with support from the UNDARK project (Unravelling the Dark Universe from the Canary Islands Observatories), which is funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe programme. It forms part of the programme tied to International Dark Matter Day, marked on 31 October.
Why it matters
Dark matter remains one of the open problems of modern astrophysics. It has never been seen to give off, take in or bounce back light, yet its gravitational pull can be inferred from effects such as the way galaxies move and the bending of light, according to the reporting. The current cosmological model puts it at roughly 85% of all matter in the universe, while its composition is still unknown.
The museum event is designed to show how science handles that gap: rather than presenting a single settled answer, it sets rival hypotheses side by side and asks what evidence each one must answer to. José Carlos Acha, the Cabildo's councillor for culture, museums and sport, said such activities let the public see different proposals for one phenomenon and understand how science tests its hypotheses against the evidence, Diario de Tenerife reports.
Three lines of explanation, one open question
The afternoon opens with María Benito Castaño, a postdoctoral researcher at the IAC whose work links astrophysics and particle physics and who studies dark matter through its traces in our galaxy. Her talk introduces the concept itself and the main evidence behind the claim that dark matter exists, along with the questions still unresolved.
Isabel Santos Santos, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP), then makes the case for cold dark matter, a cornerstone of the standard cosmological model. Her research focuses on dwarf galaxies and on cosmological simulations used to probe dark matter's properties and how galaxies form.
Jorge Sánchez Almeida, a research professor at the IAC and a doctorate holder from the University of La Laguna, covers alternative models that explore other possible accounts of dark matter's nature. His current work seeks to clarify the puzzle through astrophysical evidence.
The third perspective comes from Guillaume Thomas, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the University of La Laguna who specialises in galactic archaeology and dynamics. He argues for modified gravity, an approach that proposes revisiting the laws of gravity to explain astronomical phenomena usually put down to dark matter.
The discussion is meant to lay out what each proposal claims, which observations can support it, and which questions remain for research to settle. Members of the audience can take part through an interactive questionnaire on their mobile phones and vote on which explanation they find most convincing. As the reporting notes, the standing of a scientific explanation rests on how it holds up against the evidence, not on the result of that vote.
What to watch
The talk is free and seats are allocated on a first-come basis, so anyone planning to attend should arrive early.
