Dark Matter

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.

Physicists at Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have narrowed down the search for dark matter. Using observations of galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the team found that dark matter is likely lighter than previously thought – and interacts even less with normal matter.

Dark matter is the mysterious substance that’s believed to permeate the universe, and the discovery last year of a galaxy with no dark matter was quite surprising. But now, astronomers have examined the oddball galaxy a bit closer – and found that it’s not so special after all.

Although the many experiments searching for evidence of dark matter have yet to turn up any solid proof yet, they are making other amazing discoveries. The XENON1T experiment has now revealed the longest half-life ever seen in an element, which is far, far longer than the age of the universe.

Although dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all matter, it’s still never been directly detected. Now researchers from the State University of New York at Albany have developed a new dark matter detector using supercooled water.

In a pair of studies published this week, astronomers have shed new light on dark matter through close observation of a galaxy previously found to have very little of the stuff, while the same team found a new example of a similar oddball galaxy.

Physicists have been hunting for dark matter for decades. Hypothetical particles called axions are a long-standing candidate, but a new experiment has now found that they don’t exist – at least within a certain mass range.

How heavy is the Milky Way galaxy? A team of astronomers has used data from Hubble and the Gaia satellite to make the most accurate measurement of the mass of the galaxy by studying the motions of star clusters orbiting the Milky Way.

An astrophysicist from Oxford has put forward a new theory that suggests that dark matter and dark energy are actually part of the same phenomenon: a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.

Astronomers have spotted a mysterious “ghost” galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Huge but extremely faint, the oddball galaxy has been named Antlia 2, and it might just be weird enough to force us to rethink what we know about galactic physics and dark matter.