Dark Matter

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

An experiment designed to hunt for ever elusive dark matter has returned some strange and exciting signals. Out of the three possible explanations, one is unwanted interference – while the other two would herald new physics.

NASA has officially named its next planet hunter. Previously known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, who has often been referred to as the Mother of Hubble.

It’s been calculated that dark matter is around five times more common than regular matter – and yet, we still haven’t directly detected it. Now CERN has joined the hunt, testing whether the famous Higgs boson could decay into dark matter.

The Standard Model of particle physics still has some holes in it. Now, a new study outlines how one hypothetical particle, the axion, may be the answer to three separate, massive mysteries of the universe – including why we’re here at all.

Dark matter is believed to outnumber regular matter by a ratio of five-to-one, but so far it’s never been directly detected. Now, nuclear physicists have proposed a new candidate particle that might make up the stuff – and we’ve already found it.

Large clouds of dark matter have been indirectly detected before, but it should also form smaller clumps. Now Hubble observations have detected evidence of these small clumps for the first time, lending weight to a prevailing dark matter hypothesis.

The hunt for dark matter – the mysterious stuff that seems to outnumber regular matter by a ratio of five to one – has so far turned up no direct trace. Now, researchers at CERN have tried a new approach, using another strange substance – antimatter.

Rather than trying to see dark matter, a new experimental design from Stockholm University listens for it instead, using an “axion radio.”

Although it outnumbers regular matter by a ratio of five to one, dark matter is frustratingly elusive, and efforts to hunt down different types of candidate particles have revealed no direct trace. Now, researchers from Max Planck have proposed a new hypothetical particle that might be behind dark matter – the superheavy gravitino – and outlined just how we might find them.

Few things are as mysterious as dark matter. Now, a physicist from Johns Hopkins University has outlined a new theory that helps to explain the stuff but at the same time makes it seem even more bizarre. According to the study, dark matter may have originated before the Big Bang.

The LIGO detector uses 4-km-long (2.5-mi) arms. But now, a Northwestern University team is aiming to build a gravitational wave detector small enough to fit on a tabletop, which could detect signals the larger facilities miss.