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In pursuit of acheronian matter, researchers are doing everything from burying vats of xenon heavy underground to sending a balloon floating supra the Antarctic. When volition their creativity wage off?
Physics 8 February 2023
Michael Kirkham
IF YOU hap to walk done Antarctica aboriginal this year, you could beryllium greeted with a peculiar sight. Peel your eyes distant from the penguins and you mightiness spot thing antithetic floating successful the sky: a balloon the size of a stadium. Trailing beneath it volition beryllium the latest mad-sounding experimentation designed to look for the astir maddening happening scientists person ever dreamed up – dark matter.
We reckon astir 85 per cent of the universe’s substance is exotic worldly that doesn’t reflect, emit oregon sorb light, which is wherefore it is called acheronian matter. The lone unit that this hypothetical worldly decidedly deigns to interact with is gravity, arsenic acold arsenic we know, which makes it incredibly hard to detect. “When I gave talks connected this successful the 80s, I was telling people, ‘Oh, we’re going to fig this retired successful 10 years’,” says Katherine Freese, an astrophysicist astatine the University of Texas astatine Austin. Decades later, we are inactive waiting. “It’s evidently a harder occupation than we realised.”
In the look of that hard truth, acheronian substance hunters person go ever much inventive. Attempts implicit the years to pin down what it is made of see burying vats of liquid xenon heavy underground, measuring the straightness of lightning bolts, a program to observe nanoscale explosions successful minerals, examining past rocks for acheronian substance scars and checking the James Webb Space Telescope’s observations for “dark stars”. All of which raises the question: are immoderate suggestions for acheronian substance searches a agelong changeable excessively far? And astatine what constituent would we see giving up the chase?
The archetypal hints that …
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