Physicists Just Turned The Entire Planet Into a Dark Matter Detector - And Strange Signals Kept Turning Up
Physicists have utilized the Earth as a massive detector to search for dark matter, identifying several candidate signals that align with theoretical predictions. While these findings are preliminary and require further verification, they offer a novel approach to investigating the mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe.
Why it matters
Confirming the existence of dark matter particles like axions would fundamentally change our understanding of physics and the composition of the cosmos.
Add ScienceAlert on Google (NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) Physicists have conducted a worldwide hunt for dark matter . Literally – they turned Earth itself into a giant detector.
Weirder still, the experiment picked up dozens of candidate signals that fit predictions for certain types of hypothetical particles that could make up dark matter.
Those signals still need verification, and there's plenty of other things that they could be before they're dark matter particles. But it's a clever experiment with some tantalizing new clues to one of the most mind-bending cosmological puzzles.
There's plenty of evidence that there's more to the Universe than what we can see. Our models of how visible matter is spread and moves across the cosmos don't quite line up with its actual distribution and motion in the real world.
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