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Chicago (UPI) Aug 11, 2010 U.S. physicists say they'll take their search to find and identify the universe's "dark matter" to new depths -- into a Canadian mine almost a mile underground. University of Chicago researchers will take bubble chambers, instruments that can detect cosmic particles, to SNOLab, part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada, a university release said Wednesday. They're hoping dark matter particles will leave tracks as they pass through the liquid in the chambers. Dark matter accounts for almost 90 percent of all matter in the universe. Invisible to telescopes, scientists assume its existence based on its gravitational influence on galaxies. "There is a lot more mass than literally meets the eye," Juan Collar, associate physics professor at the University of Chicago, said. "When you look at the matter budget of the universe, we have a big void there that we can't explain." Theorists suspect dark matter is made up of subatomic particles. Two likely candidates are weakly interacting massive particles and axions, which the researchers hope to capture in their bubble chambers.
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Radio Astronomers Develop New Technique For Studying Dark EnergyCharlottesville VA (SPX) Jul 23, 2010 Pioneering observations with the National Science Foundation's giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have given astronomers a new tool for mapping large cosmic structures. The new tool promises to provide valuable clues about the nature of the mysterious "dark energy" believed to constitute nearly three-fourths of the mass and energy of the Universe. Dark energy is the label scie ... read more |
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