Scientists believe they've made a major breakthrough in unravelling the mystery that is dark matter..
Physicist Samuel Ting says the first results to be published from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device attached to the side of the International Space Station, "will not be a minor paper", reports Space.com.
He made the comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sunday.
Dr Ting, principle investigator on the study, said the paper is so important it was rewritten 30 times before its submission to a scientific journal.
Dark matter is invisible, and has never been detected directly, but its effects can be measured on normal matter via gravity and radiation. Without dark matter – and its energy equivalent, known as dark energy – widely accepted scientific theories such as General Relativity don't add up.
It's believed as much as 96 percent of the universe's total energy and matter is 'dark'. Some theories state dark matter particles, being their own antimatter partners, destroy one another on impact, releasing an electron and a positron in the process.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is able to detect these tiny particles, but not dark matter itself as it does not interact via electromagnetism or the strong atomic force.
The soon-to-be-released paper details how many were found, and at what energies.
If the particles – positrons, which are the antimatter counterpart to electrons – are found clustered around a "very specific" energy level it would be a "smoking gun", says Michael Turner, University of Chicago cosmologist.
"That's the key signature that would arise."
Another sign would be if the positrons are found to be all around, as dark matter is believed to be, as opposed to coming from a single direction, which would indicate they were created in some kind of astrophysical event.
"There is a lot of stuff that can mimic dark matter, theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University told Space.com.
"In these experiments the question is when do you have antimatter that could be explained by astrophysical sources, and when do you have something that really could be an indication that you have something new?"
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was carried into space aboard the second-to-last-ever space shuttle mission.
3 News
source: newshub archive
