The cosmos contains a Higgs field—similar to an electric field—generated by Higgs bosons in the vacuum. Particles interact with the field to gain energy and, through Albert Einstein’s iconic equation, E=mc2, mass.The Standard Model of particle physics, although successful at describing elementary particles and their interactions at low energies, does not include a viable and hotly debated dark-matter particle. The only possible candidates, neutrinos, do not have the right properties to explain the observed dark matter.
In 2018 a team of physicists linked to the massive IceCube Observatory detector buried under the South Pole, and to a command center at Penn State University, advanced satellites, and several land-based observatories, pinpointed the first known cosmic source of a neutrino, a ghost-like particle that passes through virtually all matter on Earth. It’s estimated that each second there are about 100 billion neutrinos passing through your body. (more…)
Could dark matter particles the size of galaxies exist, or a anti-gravitational force field we call “dark energy” that might be getting stronger and denser, leading to a future in which atoms are ripped apart and time ends?
An enormous “something” more massive than a star, appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found in data from Gaia spacecraft observations—a mission producing the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard’s Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream. Bonaca is a leading authority on how the tidal field of the Milky Way galaxy disrupts globular clusters, and what the resulting debris can tell us about the underlying distribution of dark matter. (more…)
Did NASA scientists detect a dark matter signal from deep inside the Milky Way? In December of 2017, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory observed a strange and distinctive X-ray signal from deep inside the dynamic center of the Milky Way, the 3.5 keV line, that researchers believed could help them in proving the existence of the hidden, dark side of our universe.
