Beitrag Do 29. Apr 2021, 04:51

Ancient Rocks May Hold Key To Detecting Dark Matter

Ancient Rocks May Hold Key To Detecting Dark Matter

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Here’s a secret. Astronomers can’t explain how galaxies rotate and even how swarms of galaxies move. Our best theories of gravity and our most thorough surveys of stars and clouds of gas and galaxies utterly fail to predict the motion that is actually observed. Theory and observation can only be reconciled if an unseen form of matter is hypothesized. This unseen form of matter is called dark matter and a group of astronomers have proposed a novel method for detecting whether it really exists.

Dark matter is thought to be the dominant form of matter in the universe – about five times more prevalent than the matter that makes up all of the stars and the galaxies that astronomers have ever imaged. And nobody has ever seen dark matter. By its very nature it can never be seen, as it neither emits nor absorbs light. Despite many decades of searching by the world’s best astronomers, dark matter remains an unproven hypothesis.

However, a group of scientists have come up with a clever idea on how ancient rocks might be able to see the unseeable. This technique relies on a specific model of how dark matter can be found in the solar system.

The visible Milky Way galaxy is a disk about a hundred thousand light years across and about a thousand light years thick. However the dark matter surrounding the Milky Way is thought to be a spherical cloud about 800,000 light years across. While the amount of dark matter in the universe is about five times more than ordinary matter, the volume of the dark matter portions of the Milky Way galaxy is about 30,000 times larger than the visible disk. While the distribution of dark matter isn’t uniform within that sphere, these numbers show that the density of dark matter in the vicinity of the sun is much lower than visible matter, especially on solid bodies like the Earth.

Thus, what scientists imagine is that throughout the solar system there exists a “dark matter wind” that is blowing through planets like the Earth. Because dark matter is so diffuse and it doesn’t interact via electromagnetism (that is to say via any chemical processes), this dark matter will pass through the Earth with nearly no chance of interacting.

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