The Search Continues:

[beecee]

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-dark.html

Finding dark matter in the dark:

March 7, 2019 by Dr Daryl Holland, University of Melbourne:

Dark matter is the mysterious material that holds the Universe together, yet no one has seen it; or heard, smelled, tasted or touched it either.

But that may soon change, and a laboratory 1000 metres below the ground in the Stawell gold mine halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide could be the epicentre of this discovery.

Physicists have had a good run recently at detecting the seemingly undetectable. First there was the Higg's Boson, confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, nearly 50 years after it existence was first proposed. Then in 2015 the LIGO detectors found gravitational waves, a century after Einstein predicted them. Both discoveries were rewarded with Nobel Prizes.

If all goes to plan, in the next few years dark matter will move from the realm of the hypothetical to the observable, opening a new era in experimental physics, and a major step towards a fundamental theory of nature.

Professor Elisabetta Barberio is leading the Australian effort to detect dark matter, as the Director of the Centre for Dark Matter Particle Physics. The University of Melbourne physicist says Australia is uniquely positioned to confirm the existence of dark matter.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-dark.html#jCp

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I certainly like the reasoning and logic behind this attempt.

extract: 

"In June the Earth is travelling around the galaxy at about 260 km per second, whereas in December it is more like 200 km per second. Therefore we would expect the Earth to be hit by more dark matter in June than in December. And this is what the Gran Sasso team observes in their data."

"To remove this potential error, we need to repeat the experiments in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are flipped. If we see a seasonal pattern, with a peak in summer and a minimum in winter, then the data from Italy needs to be rethought. If we see the same annual pattern, however, with a peak in June and a minimum in December, this could be the evidence that finally confirms the existence of dark matter."

 

Edited March 8, 2019 by beecee