New Scientist: Did a dark matter particle just splash in?
New Scientist‘s Valerie Jamieson blogs today that other blogs – those that take physics seriously – are abuzz with rumours that a particle of dark matter has tripped through a detector in the Soudan mine deep beneath Minnesota. She first reported, and then took back in an updated iteration of her blog, that a paper on this perhaps-sighting is due soon in Nature. Maybe it was a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), maybe not. Maybe meetings in California at SLAC and at UC Santa Barbara, and at Fermilab outside Chicago, will reveal new detail and new rumors.
This is so exciting that The Tracker immediately fired up another fast-dancing physics blog, Cosmic Variance. Tons of good stuff there on this week’s news – Copenhagen, e-mails, super duper deep Hubble field (see next post). But on dark matter, zilch. So far. The New Scientist article does link to one other blog – Resonaances - that does have some info suggesting that something dark is afoot. Maybe.
A few other outlets are picking up the story as related in New Scientist:
- Popular Science – Stuart Fox: Has dark matter finally been detected on Earth ; It’s unclear whether Fox noticed the Resonaances blog himself, or got tipped by the New Scientist rendition. But Fox relays word that, most likely, the new data are old data that already have been well chewed-over.
- Daily Mail (UK): Scientists expected to unveil the discovery of dark matter ; Hmm. Not sure this “discovers” it as, perhaps and if lots more data confirm it, it’d be better to say it identifies what it is. The ‘it’ part seems to have been discovered via its gravity. The illus above, taken from this story, is a map of dark matter in one part of the cosmos. And it’s also a stretch to say the unveiling is expected when it’s merely rumored to be perhaps in the offing.
- Charlie Petit
December 9th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
[...] where you can read the basic story; see also New Scientist. It’s to the point where it’s more suspicious if we don’t mention it than if we do, so here you [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Hard to say where that above comment came from, either Sean or some robo pingback machine. But yes, follow the link to Cosmic Variance in the post above and you will see Sean Carroll’s carefully calibrated conjecture, added after I’d finished our post here, on what this may be about.