Video: The search for dark energy and dark matter

Physicist Patricia Burchat sheds light on two basic ingredients of our universe: dark matter and dark energy. Comprising 96% of the universe between them, they can't be directly measured, but their influence is immense.

Patricia Burchat studies the universe's most basic ingredients -- the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that are massively more abundant than the visible stars and galaxies. She is one of the founders of the BaBar Collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a project that's hoping to answer the question, "If there are as many anti-particles as there are particles, why can't we see all these anti-particles?"

She's also a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, which will allow scientists to monitor exploding supernovae and determine how fast the universe is expanding -- and map how mass is distributed throughout the universe. Burchat received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.