At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter

At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter

NY Times article

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.

Rather fascinating. We've heard about Dark matter for a few years now fairly regularly. We heard it was undetectable.

Now we find "faint hints" in the bottom of a mine in Minnesota?

Rather interesting.. Cryogenic Dark Matter.

Just goes to show how much we really do not know about our world, inward, and outward.. and especially what lies beneath us.

Other sources:National Geographic Article
The Guardian

Originally posted by Cygnis
Just goes to show how much we really do not know about our world, inward, and outward.. and especially what lies beneath us.

Assuming it's a genuine hit, it actually means we have a pretty good idea about certain things. If it was undetectable, noone would be trying to detect it. Placing the detector deep in the planet is to minimize interaction of more ordinary things with it. It's difficult to detect because it normally passes through ordinary baryonic matter (and the planet) with little chance of an interaction, atoms being mostly internally void.

I didn't think that we could find dark matter on our planet.
Wow, this is a sensational discovery.

Hopefully if it is actually dark matter, they could try to manipulate it to test it using technology. We could learn so much more from this hidden substance.

Originally posted by BlackPoison94
I didn't think that we could find dark matter on our planet.
Wow, this is a sensational discovery.

If it's a major constituent of the galaxy, it's most likely passing right though you, me and the planet at this very moment.


Edit: I notice this is a couple months old. Still, I was unaware of it. I wonder if there's been any further news? Google is my friend.

[edit on 2/10/2010 by EnlightenUp]

And yes - I do believe your right. Probably passing through me like neutrinos.
I have very background knowledge on this topic, I've forgotten most of it, but what is the antiparticle of dark matter?

[edit on 10/2/2010 by BlackPoison94]

Originally posted by BlackPoison94
I have very background knowledge on this topic, I've forgotten most of it, but what is the antiparticle of dark matter?

As I have come to understand and as the Wiki article states, it's possible the particle and antiparticle are the same. The will annihilate upon colliding with each other.

en.wikipedia.org...

If WIMPs are majorana particles (the particle and antiparticle are the same) then two WIMPs colliding would annihilate to produce gamma rays, and particle-antiparticle pairs.

Well, in my understanding of anti-matter, if you bring matter and anti-matter together, you get an annialation of matter to equal only a constant of energy.

But that doesn't seem to make sense for dark-matter and reguler matter.. they seem, in my understanding, to compliment each other.

Ah, that's rather ununusual.

So if dark matter is its own antiparticle, surely there would be some activity in the mine?

Originally posted by BlackPoison94
Ah, that's rather ununusual.

So if dark matter is its own antiparticle, surely there would be some activity in the mine?

It's not so unusual for a particle to be its own antiparticle. Such is the case with photons.

Although particles and their antiparticles have opposite charges, electrically neutral particles need not be identical to their antiparticles. The neutron, for example, is made out of quarks, the antineutron from antiquarks, and they are distinguishable from one another because neutrons and antineutrons annihilate each other upon contact. However, other neutral particles are their own antiparticles, such as photons, the hypothetical gravitons, and WIMPs. These are called Majorana particles and can annihilate with themselves.

Antiparticle

The annihilation signature should exist throughout concentrations of dark matter while detector hits are simply a scattering off nucleii in the detector.

There is so little we understand about dark matter at this point, it's all conjecture anyways.

We've just hit the tip of the iceburg with discovering trace amounts or evidence that it exists.

Perhaps we will have a jump in science fields once more is understood.

Only time will tell, but it is certainly exciting to think we found the mythical holy grail of science, or at least tangable evidence of such.