Could Your GPS Device Prove The Existance of Dark Matter? Theory Suggests So!

Well... rather those frustrating moments when your GPS doesn't work correctly, that is. Read on:

GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter.

Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit.

That's where GPS comes in. The network of satellites is about 50,000 kilometres in diameter, and is travelling through space – along with the entire solar system – at about 300 kilometres a second. So any time shift when the solar system passes through a cosmic kink will take a maximum of 170 seconds to move across network.

Other things could perturb GPS timekeeping, but only a signal from dark matter would have that signature, say Derevianko and Pospelov.

Derevianko is already mining 15 years' worth of GPS timing data for dark matter's fingerprints. If he doesn't find anything, he plans to continue the search using the Network for European Accurate Time and Frequency Transfer (NEAT-FT), a network of ground-based atomic clocks that is under construction in Europe. Each of these clocks is far more sensitive than a satellite clock.

Source

If true this could be a fascinating window into the structure of not only the universe - but also might offer a glimpse into the mystery we call time - the perception of a continuum moving in one direction at a stable rate of speed. This aspect of physics has always fascinated me. Time and our perception of it - even if time exists or is simply a by product or measure of something else, such as entropy. Why we have a perception of time is also something that gives me headaches late at night.

Time and dark matter being entwined is suggested by the article - the rest is my own questioning.

Since there are much brighter scientific minds on ATS than mind, I thought I would bring this conversation to the table to see what others might have to say about this theory. Who knows, somebody might come along and help me with those headaches!

Thanks for reading ATS!

It's an interesting theory but it doesn't excite me. I'd rather just let him go through the 15 years of data and report back on it.

The idea is that dark matter exists as clumps in space-time, much like sporadic fog patches on a freeway. Combine that with the fact that dark matter would cause a slow-down of time, this in turn would cause the GPS satellites to go out of sync by a few billionths of a second. So we would then expect to see groups of satellites go out of sync or even the whole system.