LEAD, S.D. \u2014 Scientists have made a possible breakthrough in the hunt for dark matter \u2014 observing hints of it during an experiment about a mile underground in South Dakota \u2014 though they stopped short of \u200bsaying they have finally detected this elusive cosmic component.<\/p>\n
The researchers described a particle interaction documented at the Sanford Underground Research Facility \u2014 built in a former gold mine in the state’s Black Hills region \u2014 that may have involved a hypothesized particle called a WIMP, short for “weakly interacting massive particle.” This is one of the \u200cproposed candidates for being a dark matter particle.<\/p>\n
Ordinary matter makes up stars, planets, people and everything else we can see. But it represents only about 15% of all the matter in the universe. The rest is thought to be \u2060dark matter, which does not emit or reflect light, making it invisible to the \u200bhuman eye and to telescopes. But scientists are confident dark matter exists because of \u2060its gravitational effects at galactic scales.<\/p>\n
Particle physicist Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol in England, lead author of a study describing the work, said it “could be the first hint \u200cof a dark matter observation.”<\/p>\n
Dark matter is \u200cthought to interact only extremely rarely with ordinary matter. The ongoing LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment in which the observation occurred is designed to catch \u2060such interactions and is optimized to look for WIMPs.<\/p>\n
It employs 10 tons of the chemical element xenon in liquid \u2060form inside a detector device \u2014 a large cylindrical vessel \u2014 that is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.<\/p>\n
The researchers are searching for dark matter scattering off xenon atoms. When a particle scatters, they would observe flashes of light, with the properties of these flashes revealing what type of particle interacted with the xenon.<\/p>\n
In an announcement made on Tuesday at a scientific conference in Japan and described in the study submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, they described the detection of an interaction between a xenon atom and another particle that appeared to unfold in a way hypothesized for a WIMP.<\/p>\n
They said what they may have observed was \u200ca WIMP colliding with a xenon atom’s nucleus, transferring a small amount of energy that produced a faint flash of UV \u200blight that was detected in the experiment. And the collision caused the xenon atom’s nucleus to jolt forward in what is called a nuclear recoil.<\/p>\n
‘Just a single event’<\/p>\n
While the researchers said the interaction acted as they would expect a WIMP to act, they cautioned that the observation does not yet meet the statistical threshold needed to claim a discovery of dark matter.<\/p>\n
“Importantly, as it’s just a single event, we are not claiming that it is dark matter,” Eriksen said.<\/p>\n
The researchers are working to rule out other explanations.<\/p>\n
“We may be looking at something extraordinary, but we have to be exceptionally rigorous before drawing that conclusion,” UCLA astrophysicist and study coauthor Alvine Kamaha said.<\/p>\n
Scientists are unsure of the nature of dark matter, just as they are uncertain about the nature of the mysterious cosmic force called dark energy.<\/p>\n
“There could be millions of dark \u200bmatter particles passing through our bodies every second, and yet almost none of them will ever interact with an atom in our bodies,” Kamaha said.<\/p>\n
A leading hypothesis is that dark matter is made of a type of \u200cparticle produced in \u200cthe early universe and still present today.<\/p>\n
“When \u2060we observe galaxies and clusters of galaxies, we see that they behave as though they contain much more mass than the matter we can see. So although we cannot see dark matter itself, we can observe what its gravity does,” Kamaha said.<\/p>\n
“You can think of dark matter as the cosmic glue that helped enable the formation of galaxies like our Milky Way. Without dark matter, the universe would have evolved very differently, and the structures that eventually led to our solar system may not have formed in the same way,” Kamaha said.<\/p>\n
Scientists are \u200csearching for dark matter in several ways.<\/p>\n
“We study \u200bits gravitational effects on galaxies and the universe. We try to produce dark matter particles in particle \u200caccelerators. And we perform direct detection using experiments \u2060buried deep underground, like LZ, to shield \u200bthem from cosmic rays and other sources of background while we look for the extremely rare occasion when a dark matter particle interacts with ordinary matter,” Kamaha said.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEAD, S.D. \u2014 Scientists have made a possible breakthrough in the hunt for dark matter \u2014 observing hints…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1038516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[419,418,421,1801,420,425,1759,50,422,423,159,62,158,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":["post-1038515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-nature","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-science","tag-sports","tag-technology","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117200585536132912","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1038516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}