lpetrich
Contributor
Dark Matter is the name given to a mysterious substance that contributes much of the Universe's mass. Strictly speaking, it is not "dark" but invisible. The only evidence that we have of its existence is from its gravity -- we have yet to discover any convincing nongravitational evidence of its existence.
4 Dark Matter Experiments to Keep an Eye on in 2019
LIGO comes back online
Can LIGO Find the Missing Dark Matter?
It might be primordial black holes, and LIGO might detect g-wave evidence of them.
Physicists will try to figure out whether MiniBooNE gave up the ghost of a neutrino
Possible evidence of "sterile neutrinos" in its data.
First light at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
The race to build a next-generation detector will heat up
Three experiments are being worked on, each of which will look at 4 to 10 tons of xenon. They should start operation this year or the next.
4 Dark Matter Experiments to Keep an Eye on in 2019
LIGO comes back online
Can LIGO Find the Missing Dark Matter?
It might be primordial black holes, and LIGO might detect g-wave evidence of them.
Physicists will try to figure out whether MiniBooNE gave up the ghost of a neutrino
Possible evidence of "sterile neutrinos" in its data.
First light at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
There's a telescope being built in Chile that will make detailed images of vast regions of the sky every 15 seconds, completing a full scan of the sky every three days. Over the course of 10 years, it will compare those images to one another again and again to track how the sky shifts and changes, providing the most in-depth-ever resource for understanding how dark matter pushes and pulls on the cosmos.
The race to build a next-generation detector will heat up
Not just sparkles of light, but "sparkles" of sound, from dark-matter particles bouncing off of detector-material atomic nuclei.Particle physicists have speculated for a long time that the first direct sign of dark matter might be a sparkle. Here's how it might work: As dark matter collides with inert substances in very dark rooms, those substances would emit faint specks of light. For decades, scientists have built detectors according to this principle, but so far, none have produced a conclusive result.
Three experiments are being worked on, each of which will look at 4 to 10 tons of xenon. They should start operation this year or the next.