Thursday, December 17, 2009

Dark Matter?

"An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

Dark matter became a serious issue in the 1970s, when Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her colleagues charted the rotation speeds of galaxies and found that they seemed to be enveloped in halos of dark matter, then called missing mass."

A wide range of astrophysical and cosmological measurements have subsequently converged on an intimidating recipe for the cosmos of 4 percent atoms, 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent a mysterious energy that has been called dark energy and has nothing to do with the news on Thursday." Today at the NYT.

This is only tantalizing. Bigger and better detectors are needed.

Somehow this experiment doesn't ring true to me.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nope, they didn't find anything, and they won't.

It's about like the low-energy higgs bumps that they found.

They are statistical anomalies.

Eduardo Cantoral said...

To this late date. No new particles:(

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