The
presence of dark matter has been known to scientist for decades, but working
out what it is essentially made from has been a frustrating hunt. Professor
David Cline has told a UCLA symposium of
the discovery of what can be the first cold dark matter particle, an object
weighing about 30 billion electron volts. The very first mark for dark
matter was appeared in 1932 when Jan Oort noticed that different objects are
spinning around the enormous plane as if our galaxy has noticeably more mass
than we can see. This led astronomers to start further study on other galaxies
and they found the same pattern. After this study two main and well known
theories emerged: Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and Weakly Interacting
Massive Particles (WIMPS).
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| Photo credit: ESO/L. Calçada |
Weakly
Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) involves subatomic particles with no
strong nuclear interaction or electromagnetic charge; Massive Compact Halo
Objects (MACHOs) speculates objects much larger size like planets or stars that
don't shine at all. It is predicted that the dark matter, which we cannot see,
accounts for more than five times as much mass in the known universe as the
normal matter. With time the weight of scientific support of existence of dark
matter has moved to the idea that WIMPS account for most of what we are
missing, but finding them has been more of a problem. Neutrinos were once
believed to be the answer, but the neutrinos left over from the creation of the
universe travel too fast, and so would be too equally spread, to account for
the mass chunk around galaxies. After every two years UCLA organizes a seminar
to debate development in the search for dark matter of one form or another.
Nothing has been published yet, but Cline, of the home campus's College of
Letters and Science, commented, "At this symposium, it was obvious that
excitement is building in the fields of dark matter theory and, especially,
detection."
The
Fermi telescope formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope has
found mysterious gamma rays, which Cline considers may be produced by the
particles. In underground laboratories efforts to get Weakly Interacting
Massive Particles (WIMPS) to interact with atomic nuclei have failed to find
anything, but Cline said, “there is no incompatibility [in these detectors'
null results] with the interesting excess in the FERMI data."
"Because
dark matter makes up the bulk of the mass of galaxies and is fundamental in the
formation of galaxies and stars, it is essential to the origin of life in the
universe and on Earth," said Cline.