Dark matter detected (possibly) in Minnesota mine

I wonder what it was doing in there.

It is still early to tell for sure if this is not a false alarm, but signs seem very promising.

There are no practical applications in sight so far, of course; but if this discovery is genuine, it could teach us a lot about cosmology and physics. The search for dark matter has been one of the main open problems of the last few decades, and now it looks like it — much like the Higgs boson — might be settled.

The last few years have been great for experimental physics, even counting the neutrino debacle. I wonder if this is just chance, or if it is because our technological improvements (I'm thinking in particular about automatic data mining) have made detection easier...

edited 16th Apr '13 9:28:38 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Hmm...interesting. Lets see how this goes on.

edited 16th Apr '13 10:21:33 AM by 3of4

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I'm excited.

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I don't know anything about astrophysics, so this may be a very stupid question, but: could we go down there and touch it?

edited 16th Apr '13 11:10:01 AM by Achaemenid

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If you want to blow up like an atomic bomb, sure.

EDIT: Oh, wait, am I confusing this stuff with anti-matter? I think I am.

edited 16th Apr '13 11:22:01 AM by Kayeka

They are just tiny little particles passing through. If the dark matter was down there, it means that it's everywhere, all the time, like cosmic rays. The reason for putting the detectors down in the mine is to isolate them from all the other sources of tiny particles that would mess up the results if they were up on the surface.

Cosmic rays can actually be pretty harmful.

Clearly, someone dug too greedily and too deep.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Yes, dark matter is almost certainly not too explodey — apparently it constitutes most of the mass of the Universe , after all

If this experiment is confirmed, it could help explain why the universe seems to behave as if it had much more mass than what it seems to have. It's pretty much impossible to predict at this stage which practical applications this will have, if any; but nonetheless, this is extremely cool.

edited 16th Apr '13 12:25:36 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, we have the shadow...what about the flame?

edited 16th Apr '13 12:25:12 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

I think it positively dwarfs (Dwarves?) the last big physics revelation.

Srsly, though, very cool.

edited 16th Apr '13 12:45:52 PM by TheGirlWithPointyEars

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Go go LOTR references.

The thing about dark matter is that it's extremely massive, but its particles have virtually no interaction with our ordinary matter. Those one in a quintillion random collisions are what the detectors are designed to measure; the idea being that they isolate out all the other signals so that they can identify the few tiny blips that are significant.

Imagine searching an entire beach for the one grain of sand that's got an atom of a rare but totally inert element. Or, since we're talking about electronics, note what happens to a cheap consumer camera when you take a long exposure in low light — the "noise" in the picture is random background radiation that drowns out the very weak light signal. Same with dark matter, except the signal to noise ratio is a billion times weaker.

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Hmmm, this is very interesting, but I think we need moria data before we can be sure.

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The existence of dark matter was already proved to a satisfactory degree by measurement of gravitational lensing. The question was what the dark matter consisted of, of which WIMPS were a popular candidate.

This is just a pun by physicists. Of course there's dark matter in mines, and it'll be illuminated matter when they turn the lights on.

All joking aside, this is pretty cool, assuming it's not a false positive.

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Physicists: the only people who get surprised when they go digging in a coal mine and find dark matter.

Seriously though, looks interesting. Is it static or just shot through in cosmic coincidence?

edited 16th Apr '13 1:07:40 PM by Pykrete

Oooooo.

Just shot through. There's a detector there meant to search for passing dark matter. Since dark matter interacts so weakly there wouldn't be the friction that keeps everything else on earth moving at the same speed cosmically speaking so it'd be essentially impossible for it to be static.

Guys, dont think that they are mining dark matter. The DM isnt in the mine. These are tiny little particles moving at high speed through the earth, including the mine. If this experiment is confirmed, it basically means DM passes through us all the time.

Clarification in case someone read this and was left wondering: the interaction that dark matter has with what we would call just "matter" is through gravity. Most of the gravity of the universe is caused by dark matter - the "regular" matter that we're composed of is actually just a minority of the contents of the universe.

The reason we know about dark matter is that it does interact with our type of matter through gravity, and this has been known for a pretty long time by know.

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The estimated particle mass based on these latest experiments is about 9 proton masses, according to my calculations. Not sure if that counts as 'extremely massive' or not as far as particle physics goes.

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edited 16th Apr '13 9:46:28 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Of course he isn't. Nobody does role-playing in the mines. Too dark and lack of tables.

Back about the Dark Matter: An acquaintance who works on this is going to be excited about this news. I really hope that we find out what it actually is (I vaguely remember something theorise that it is neutrinos).

If this experiment is confirmed, dark matter is made of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), not neutrinos.

Apparently, the other possible explanation for "cold" dark matter was MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) — I swear, physicist humour is even worse than mathematician humour

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

A number of experiments have been done on neutrino detection, and they've pretty much ruled out neutrinos as an explanation for more than about 1% of the dark matter out there.

Also, the 9 proton mass figure from these latest observations is way out of the neutrino ballpark, so if they're really detecting dark matter, it's something quite different.

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