Breaking News: Dark Matter Might Have Been Detected!

What is dark matter?

Dark matter is the mysterious and invisible substance keeping galaxies together and governing the structure of the universe, even making up 85% of the universe! It was first discovered to be keeping galaxies together through its gravitational pull, but it has never been detected.

At first, people were looking for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs for short, using large setups, but after fifty years there were still no signals. However, a recent analysis by the LUX-ZEPLIN detector, or LZ, has proved otherwise!

How LZ Works

The LZ is basically a 7 tonne tank full of liquid xenon with many very fine sensors along the inside of the tank, buried deep underground and protected by many layers to prevent other particles from entering. You see, when a particle comes into contact with a xenon atom, a tiny flash of light is emitted, only to be detected by the sensors.

LZ needs to be underground and protected so that no other external particles can enter, but since it is thought that WIMPs will pass through ordinary matter, they will get through and hit one of the xenon atoms, creating a burst if light, which people can use to reconstruct where the particle came from! (The video above goes into more detail about this).

The Discovery

Normally the researchers working with LZ are looking for reactions under 30 kiloelectron volts (keV), which would mean that the particle is bouncing off the nucleus of the xenon atom.

However, the team decided to look at the first 220 days for higher energy level events, and that's when they found it. They found an anomaly that could very well be a WIMP at 248 keV! This means that rather than bouncing of the nucleus, a more complicated process between particle and nucleus must have taken place, which I won't describe for the simplicity of the article. But not only that! The WIMP must also have been 200 times the mass of a proton due to the brightness of the flash!

However, it could also be a mistake. Perhaps it was a fluke. Maybe an accident. The statistics say that the chance of it being a fluke is 1 in 200, and while that may seem like a large range, as the LZ spokesperson Richard Gaitskell says "In science we sit down and we do so many damned experiments, I’m afraid you come across a 1 in 100 event fairly often."

So now dark matter researchers all over the world are looking again at their data, this time scanning for higher levels of keV, and if more signals are found, this could be a confirmed sighting of dark matter, being one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in physics, changing the way we see our universe for ever.

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility... The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." - Albert Einstein

Fully written by me, no LLM or AI was used in the process.