Latest Dark matter Stories

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.It's a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles...

Astronomers have devised a new method for measuring perhaps the greatest puzzle of our universe "” dark energy. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds.For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space "” a massive cluster of galaxies "” to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods,...

This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground.The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these...

The discovery is expected to shed light on the early stages of solar system formation.Astronomers have imaged a very young brown dwarf, or failed star, in a tight orbit around a young nearby sun-like star.An international team led by University of Hawaii astronomers Beth Biller and Michael Liu with help from University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and UA graduate students Eric Nielsen, Jared Males and Andy Skemer made the rare find using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI,...

Scientists leading an underground experiment to discover dark matter may be forced to relocate to a location even deeper below the Earth's surface, according to recent BBC News reports.Cosmic rays are to blame for disrupting the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) project, according to BBC Science Reporter Paul Rincon. The CDMS II experiments are currently taking place the Soudan mine in Minnesota, but could be relocated to the SNOLAB facility near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.As said rays...

The EPFL's Laboratory of Astrophysics has for the first time observed a quasar that is located between the earth and a more distant galaxy and acts as a gravitational lensA quasar acting as a gravitational lens has now been observed for the first time. This discovery, made by the EPFL's Laboratory of Astrophysics in cooperation with Caltech, represents an advance in the field, since it will allow scientists to weigh and measure a galaxy that contains a quasar. The news is published July 20 in...

Neutrinos are likely half as massive as previous estimates suggestedPhysicists have long known that neutrinos are among the lightest and most evasive fundamental particles. Now a survey of the galaxies is helping to narrow down the neutrino mass even further. It seems that neutrinos are at best half as massive as previously estimated, according to an analysis appearing today in the journal Physical Review Letters.The lower neutrino mass estimate is the result of a 3-dimensional survey of more...

Many of the Milky Way's ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies torn apart by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to researchers at Durham University, who publish their results in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Scientists at Durham's Institute for Computational Cosmology and their collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in Germany, and Groningen University, in Holland, ran huge...

Astronomers have uncovered what appear to be 14 of the coldest stars known in our universe. These failed stars, called brown dwarfs, are so cold and faint that they'd be impossible to see with current visible-light telescopes. Spitzer's infrared vision was able to pick out their feeble glow, much as a firefighter uses infrared goggles to find hot spots buried underneath a dark forest floor.The brown dwarfs join only a handful of similar objects previously discovered. The new objects are...

Scientists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the "ghost particles" known as neutrinos, according to a recent BBC report. Neutrinos are called ghost particles because they interact so weakly with other forms of matter. Previous experiments show that neutrinos have a mass, but it was so tiny it was unable to be measured. Researchers used data from the largest every survey of galaxies and put the mass of a neutrino at no greater than 0.28 electron volts. The scientists...