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Has Dark Matter Finally Been Found?

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A

Amir0x

Banned
BOSTON — Big news in the search for dark matter may be coming in about two weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment said today (Feb. 17) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's when the first paper of results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, will be submitted to a scientific journal, said MIT physicist Samuel Ting, AMS principle investigator.

Though Ting was coy about just what, exactly, the experiment has found, he said the results bear on the mystery of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to outnumber regular matter in the universe by a factor of about six to one.

"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said, hinting that the findings were important enough that the scientists rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it. Still, he said, it represents a "small step" in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer. [Photos: AMS Hunts Exotic Particles In Space]

Some physics theories suggest that dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles. When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles — an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process.


The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has the potential to detect the positrons and electrons produced by dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way. The $2 billion machine was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011, and so far, it has detected 25 billion particle events, including about 8 billion electrons and positrons. This first science paper will report how many of each were found, and what their energies are, Ting said.

If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a detection of dark matter, because while electrons are abundant in the universe around us, there are fewer known processes that could give rise to positrons.

"The smoking gun signature is a rise and then a dramatic fall" in the number of positrons with respect to energy, because the positrons produced by dark matter annihilation would have a very specific energy, depending on the mass of the WIMPs making up dark matter, said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago who is not involved in the AMS project. "That's the key signature that would arise."

Another telling sign will be the question of whether positrons appear to be coming from one direction in space, or from all around. If they're from dark matter, scientists expect them to be spread evenly through space, but if they're created by some normal astrophysical process, such as a star explosion, then they would originate in a single direction.

"There is a lot of stuff that can mimic dark matter," said theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University, who is also not involved in the project but said she's eagerly awaiting the AMS results. "In these experiments the question is when do you have antimatter that could be explained by astrophysical sources, and when do you have something that really could be an indication that you have something new?"

Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter's origin to become clearer soon. In addition to AMS, other experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and underground dark matter detectors buried around the world, could also make a discovery in the near future.

"We believe we're on the threshold of discovery," Turner said. "We believe this will be the decade of the wimp."
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What a fascinating universe we live in
 
F

Futureman

Member
I think it's really cool for the future knowledge of mankind, but let's be honest, confirming dark matter will just lead to more questions. It's exciting... but also frustrating I guess. I wanna live forever!
 
T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
I have to get back to work but I have some very...let's say "interesting" things to say regarding this. I'll be back on later with the exciting conclusion. I just wanted to let GAF know that I am in fact going to be posting about this subject when time permits.
 
M

Majine

Banned
Timedog said:
I have to get back to work but I have some very...let's say "interesting" things to say regarding this. I'll be back on later with the exciting conclusion. I just wanted to let GAF know that I am in fact going to be posting about this subject when time permits.
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Announcement of a post, great.

Reading through the wiki right now about this stuff, pretty interesting.
 
V

Volimar

Member
So tired of announcements of announcements. Come on science, get your shit together. Will wait it out. Have no expectations till then.
 
G

gutshot

Member
Volimar said:
So tired of announcements of announcements. Come on science, get your shit together. Will wait it out. Have no expectations till then.
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Yeah, this is like NASA and their announcement of an announcement about organic materials found on Mars that turned out to be wowitsfuckingnothing.gif.
 
D

DarkFlow

Banned
I'm not getting my hopes up. They always love to hype these up, then you find out its not something very important to people not in the field of study.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
AlimNassor said:
It's the medias fault.
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The people involved are not completely blameless either. If you hype up a paper, it's more likely it'll be published in the bigger journals, which gets more people to read it, who then may cite it and will affect your standing in the community.
 
A

Air

Banned
Can't be too big if its an announcement of an announcement. It might be a stepping stone to something but I doubt it's anything of significance.
 
C

Chichikov

Member
Soneet said:
Am I understanding correctly that dark matter is everything that is not matter?
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The universe behave like there is much more matter in it than what we can observe.
Dark matter is a hypothetical (though maybe not for long) matter that we cannot detect.
Air said:
Can't be too big if its an announcement of an announcement. It might be a stepping stone to something but I doubt it's anything of significance.
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Scientific discoveries are rarely announced the same way Apple announce their products, those thing take time, are open for review and require a whole lot of verification, just look at the way the higgs boson research we reported.
 
Grinchy

Grinchy

Banned
Dark matter is what makes up the physical body of our Lord. Prove me wrong. And if you do, God was actually something else all along anyway.
 
A

Air

Banned
Chichikov said:
Scientific discoveries are rarely announced the same way Apple announce their products, those thing take time, are open for review and require a whole lot of verification, just look at the way the higgs boson research we reported.
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Yeah I know, and that's why im not expecting much from this paper. I remember some scientists were expecting that we would know what dark matter is around this time (2013-2015), but I'm not so optimistic. Still I'm very interested in hearing what they have to say, I've just been disenchanted with such boisterous headlines.

Edit: maybe boisterous is the wrong word, but I think the article may be over estimating the content found.
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
Awesome! It's all so interesting. I can only think of what this discovery can bring further down the line!
More awesome discoveries!
 
T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
I need to go to the store and buy some steak since ribeyes are on sale today. Just bought some whiskey. As soon as I get back though, I have some revelations on this new finding that are literally (and I'm being literal when I use the term literally) "shocking".
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
Timedog said:
I need to go to the store and buy some steak since ribeyes are on sale today. Just bought some whiskey. As soon as I get back though, I have some revelations on this new finding that are literally (and I'm being literal when I use the term literally) "shocking".
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Not sure if you're being sarcastic.
 
S

Steelrain

Member
eeQqRXq.jpg



Hopefully it changes the way we look at the world.....or something. Keeping my hype low.
 
K

KidA Seven

Member
Timedog said:
I need to go to the store and buy some steak since ribeyes are on sale today. Just bought some whiskey. As soon as I get back though, I have some revelations on this new finding that are literally (and I'm being literal when I use the term literally) "shocking".
Click to expand...

imK7VbtyLVoi9.gif
 
Z

ZealousD

Makes world leading predictions like "The sun will rise tomorrow"
Soneet said:
Am I understanding correctly that dark matter is everything that is not matter?
Click to expand...

Not really. There's dark matter, dark energy, antimatter, neutrinos...

Basically, with dark matter, scientists are convinced that there's a heck of a lot of matter that's not accounted for in our universe. We see a heck of a lot of matter in galaxies, but if what we saw really composed all of the matter in these galaxies, the math tells us that these galaxies would spin out and fling their stars everywhere. Gravity is somehow keeping galaxies together, and the matter that we see can't account for all of it. There has to be a lot more matter in them that we can't see. And that's dark matter.
 
Tesseract

Tesseract

Banned
it's important to remember that dark matter only reveals itself through its gravity. it's immaterial, which is why its placeholder name is kinda silly. i side with mond theorists in thinking it's a failure in our concept of gravity, or that it's part of a parallel universe. anyone who plays with mond's math should pm me to join a small think tank, we need your brain, especially if you have a mind for conformal transformation.
 
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