A team of researchers has proposed a novel path to search for drab affair : in the perturbation of spacetime itself . The team pored over information from the third observing trial of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory , or LIGO , andpublishedits findings before this month inPhysical Review Letters .
Dark thing is an umbrella term for the topic whose presence is inferred through its gravitational fundamental interaction with average thing but which is otherwise invisible . sullen topic account for about 27 % of the mass - energy content of the universe , and while it account for a immense amount of everything , it has proven vexingly difficult to observe directly . As in , scientists have n’t yet done so . Instead , they ’ve been relegating to witnessing its gravitational effect on other objects .
“ Some theories suggest sour thing behaves more like a wave than a particle , ” Alexandre Göttel , a physicist at Cardiff University and lead author of the study , told Phys.org . “ These wave would make tiny oscillations in normal matter , which can be detected by gravitational undulation detectors . ”
The LIGO facility near Livingston, Louisiana.Photo: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab / Wikimedia Commons
gravitative wave detectors like LIGO use interferometry to sense the ripples of spacetime due to the motion and interaction of massive objects like fatal cakehole and neutron stars . LIGO essentially measure out the space travelled by undercover laser ; when gravitational waves cringe or stretch spacetime , scientist can see in data that the laser travelled a very more or less longer - or - shorter length than before , indicating a gravitational wafture pass along through .
The late team looked at ultralight bosons , which are one of the hypothesized forms of dark issue ( other anatomy includeaxionsanddark photons ) . One singular feature of the dark matter the team was investigating is its faint fundamental interaction with both matter and promiscuous , similar toWeakly Interacting Massive Particles , or wimp , and could make cloud - like formations that would make it possible for it to show up in gravitative wave detector data point .
“ At an atomic level , you may imagine the dark matter field as fluctuating alongside the electromagnetic field , ” Göttel said . “ The coloured matter flying field oscillations effectively change the fundamental constant quantity , i.e. , the fine structure constant and electron mass , which govern electromagnetic interaction . ”
Though the team has not directly detected morose subject , they ready novel limits on the strength of the interaction such matter would have with the LIGO part . The team ’s new measure improve that of previous employment by a factor of 10,000 in the particular frequence range they were testing .
It may ( read : will ) be a long time before scientists directly detect sour matter for the first clip , so it ’s good that they ’re looking everywhere they can .
Dark matterLIGO
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