After its first run of more than three months, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a new experiment named LUX has proven itself the most sensitive
dark matter detector in the world.
Dark matter constitutes just over 25 percent of all matter in the Universe but cannot be directly observed, making it one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy.
Still, given that
dark matter particles have yet to be detected in the lab--where they would be spotted not by collisions with each other but by rare interactions with ordinary matter--some scientists have been hesitant to accept this exotic explanation for the high-energy glow.
Physicist Celine Boehm of Durham University in England and colleagues sought to reconcile this discrepancy by tweaking
dark matter theory.
The study, published in the journal, 'Physical Review Letters,' presents a new idea of how
dark matter was born and how to identify it with astronomical observations.
Using a new, simple mathematical framework, the study shows that
dark matter may have been produced before the Big Bang during an era known as the cosmic inflation when space was expanding very rapidly.
More recently, supercomputer simulations of the universe's structure have shown that including only visible matter does not reproduce the structures observed in the universe--a closer agreement between observations and simulations is obtained only through including both visible and
dark matter.
Essentially, the team will add the signature of
dark matter flowing in S-1 to the existing database, so that future detectors are able to pick up on new streams of
dark matter based on existing models.
The pulsar, whose atoms have been compacted into neutrons, is so dense that its extreme gravitational field could enhance any possible interactions with
dark matter. The white dwarf isn't nearly so compact.
However data from more recent observations has revealed the location of otherwise invisible
dark matter, showing it did not separate from its galaxy after all.
"So long as
dark matter doesn't interact with the universe around it, we are having a hard time working out what it is."
Whilegalaxiesand
dark matter usually go hand-in-hand, scientists have been amazed to discover a 'ghost galaxy' that is missing most, if not all, of its
dark matter.
Despite the fact that it represents most probably the best description for the electroweak and strong interactions in nature, we have at least two conclusive evidences that the Standard Model is not complete: (i) through the observation of neutrino oscillations we have established nonzero neutrino masses; (ii) a collection of cosmological and galactic observations requires the presence of nonbaryonic
dark matter in our universe.
