dark matter tagged posts

These images of the Milky Way show the distribution of gas, at left, compared to the distribution of stars, at right, after the dwarf satellite disrupts the galaxy. Credit: Sukanya Chakrabarti/Rochester Institute of Technology

A trio of brightly pulsating stars at the outskirts of the Milky Way is racing away from the galaxy and may confirm a method for detecting dwarf galaxies dominated by dark matter and explain ripples in the outer disk of the galaxy. This new method to characterize dark matter marks the first real application of galactoseismology. Just as seismologists analyze waves to infer properties about Earth’s interior, Sukanya Chakrabarti, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, uses waves in the galactic disk to map the interior structure and mass of galaxies.

This display shows a neutrino event candidate in the MicroBooNE detector. Credit: MicroBooNE

It detected its first neutrinos on Oct. 15, marking the beginning of detailed studies of these fundamental particles whose properties could be linked to dark matter, matter’s dominance over antimatter in the universe and the evolution of the entire cosmos since the Big Bang.

The MicroBooNE detector – a so-called time projection chamber filled with 170 tons of liquid argon – spotted neutrinos that were generated when proton beams from Fermilab’s accelerator complex slammed into a target a few hundred yards away from the detector.

Researchers from Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are developing tools for the acquisition of the experiment’s data and for the reconstruction of...

This 3D map illustrates the large-scale distribution of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing by using the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence Livermore National Lab team, has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. It identifies it as naturally “stealthy” today, but would have been easy to see via interactions with ordinary matter in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe.

Dark matter makes up 83% of all matter in the universe and does not interact directly with elect...

This sequence shows snapshots of a star’s density when two dark matter cores collide, where the x-axis is the plane of collision (only half the space is shown, but the remaining space can be obtained by symmetry). Although the final configuration is more compact and massive than the original, the star does not collapse into a black hole because it ejects some of its mass, slowing down its growth so that it remains stable. Credit: Brito, et al. ©2015 American Physical Society Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-dark-stars-oscillations.html#jCp

Large amounts of hidden mass inside stars might be composed of extremely lightweight hypothetical particles called axions, which are a primary dark matter candidate...