© NASAThe powerful Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) is visible at center left. The blackness of space and Earth's horizon provide the backdrop for the scene, on May 20, 2011 (Flight Day 5 of the STS-134 shuttle mission).
Boston - Big news in the search for dark matter may be coming in about two weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment said today (Feb. 17) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That's when the first paper of results from the
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, will be submitted to a scientific journal, said MIT physicist Samuel Ting, AMS principle investigator.
Though Ting was coy about just what, exactly, the experiment has found, he said the results bear on the mystery of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to outnumber regular matter in the universe by a factor of about six to one.
"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said, hinting that the findings were important enough that the scientists rewrote the paper 30 times before they were satisfied with it. Still, he said, it represents a "small step" in figuring out what dark matter is, and perhaps not the final answer.
Some physics theories suggest that
dark matter is made of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), a class of particles that are their own antimatter partner particles. When matter and antimatter partners meet, they annihilate each other, so if two WIMPs collided, they would be destroyed, releasing a pair of daughter particles - an electron and its antimatter counterpart, the positron, in the process.
The
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has the potential to detect the positrons and electrons produced by dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way. The $2 billion machine was installed on the International Space Station in May 2011, and so far, it has detected 25 billion particle events, including about 8 billion electrons and positrons. This first science paper will report how many of each were found, and what their energies are, Ting said.
If the experiment detected an abundance of positrons peaking at a certain energy, that could indicate a
detection of dark matter, because while electrons are abundant in the universe around us, there are fewer known processes that could give rise to positrons.
"The smoking gun signature is a rise and then a dramatic fall" in the number of positrons with respect to energy, because the positrons produced by dark matter annihilation would have a very specific energy, depending on the mass of the WIMPs making up dark matter, said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago who is not involved in the AMS project. "That's the key signature that would arise."
Another telling sign will be the question of whether positrons appear to be coming from one direction in space, or from all around. If they're from dark matter, scientists expect them to be spread evenly through space, but if they're created by some normal astrophysical process, such as a star explosion, then they would originate in a single direction.
"There is a lot of stuff that can mimic
dark matter," said theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard University, who is also not involved in the project but said she's eagerly awaiting the AMS results. "In these experiments the question is when do you have antimatter that could be explained by astrophysical sources, and when do you have something that really could be an indication that you have something new?"
Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter's origin to become clearer soon. In addition to AMS, other experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and underground dark matter detectors buried around the world, could also make a discovery in the near future.
"We believe we're on the threshold of discovery," Turner said. "We believe this will be the decade of the wimp."
The Cosmic Mass Deficit
by Miles Mathis
...
As tenuous and changeable a solution as dark matter has proved itself to be, it is by far the least esoteric of the current solutions to mass deficit. Hundreds of avant garde solutions have also been offered, some by big names in theoretical physics. I will also ignore these solutions, since they are strictly desperate. Some of them are frankly ludicrous, and merit no reply. Suffice it to say, here, that even the most entrenched standard model folks believe this is a problem not yet solved. Almost no one believes the answer is in hand. Many if not most would admit that the mountain of conflicting theory has reached the point of being a big unsortable mess. Most proposed solutions have little to say for themselves, to differentiate them from any other solutions, and the greater part have the appearance of groping. Even the best solution, dark matter, is so fluid and capricious, it hasn't been able to finally convince anyone.
A simple, logical solution to this mystery of the mass deficit has been sitting in full view, tacked onto the end of my paper on charge. But because I haven't put it under its own title and spent any time publicizing it as the solution, it has so far passed mostly unseen and uncommented on. Possibly it will remain in that state even now, but at least I can no longer be blamed for not highlighting it and posting the proper signs. In that paper I showed that charge must have a mass equivalent. In rigorously defining the foundational E/M field as a mechanical field (instead of an abstract or probabilistic field), I proved that this field must have mass or mass equivalence. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with the probabilities of QED; it simply means that there must be a physical field beneath these probabilities, creating them. I showed that this field cannot logically be mediated by so-called "messenger photons," since messenger photons are not mechanical bodies. They are abstract and illogical bodies, with non-mechanical properties or attributes or characteristics. Instead, the foundational E/M field (the field of charge) must be mediated by real bodies. We can call these bodies photons, if we like, but they must give their messages in a mechanical way. To do so, they must have and transfer energy. Real forces cannot be mediated by "virtual" particles. No, charge is and must be the summed mass or energy of these photons. Charge causes a force, and force cannot be imparted by a mechanically undefined field; it must be imparted by something capable of imparting force, and the only thing that is mechanically capable of this is mass or mass equivalence.
...
Addendum, 2010: I have now calculated a mass for the charge field, proving that it outweighs the "matter field" by a ratio of 19 to 1. This matches the 95% number we get for dark matter. Dark matter is the charge field. It is not non-baryonic, it is photonic. With equally simple math, I calculate the density of the charge field. It is about 1/12,000 that of normal matter. High mass, low density, just like the WIMPs wanted.
[Link]