Science & Technology - Posted by Deane Morrison-Minnesota on Friday, March 5, 2010 12:31 - 1 Comment 
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(3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Dark matter ‘bump’ detected deep underground
The signals in question came from the CDMS-II (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment, going on half a mile underground in northern Minnesota’s Soudan mine, where it is shielded from cosmic rays that would confound the results. In a nutshell, the experiment recorded what may be particles of dark matter “bumping” the nucleus of an atom of germanium, producing a detectable vibration. (Credit: NASA/Hubble Heritage Team)
MINNESOTA (US)—Physicists have recorded two interactions of subatomic particles whose signals look like those expected from the dark matter that gives shape to galaxies and forms the bulk of the Universe.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Before you can declare a definitive discovery, you have to have confirmation from other experiments going on worldwide, as well as our own next-generation experiment,” says Priscilla Cushman, physics professor at the University of Minnesota.
“There’s about a one-in-four chance the signals are caused by ordinary interactions.”
Although dark matter accounts for some 80 percent of the mass in the Universe, it is invisible because it cannot absorb, reflect, or emit light.
According to theory, it interacts extremely weakly with ordinary matter.
Its existence was only inferred when it became apparent that the visible material in galaxies couldn’t generate enough gravity to hold the galaxies together at the speeds they rotate.
A glance at an average galaxy shows a flat spiral of stars. But galaxies, including the Milky Way, are actually spherical, because most of their mass is a ball of dark matter.
Dark matter is believed to have provided the gravitational power that made normal matter coalesce into galaxies, and Earth sails through billions of these particles every second.
“There’s so much indirect evidence for dark matter, it is hard not to expect to find it,” says Cushman.
The signals in question came from the CDMS-II (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment, going on half a mile underground in northern Minnesota’s Soudan mine, where it is shielded from cosmic rays that would confound the results.
In a nutshell, the experiment recorded what may be particles of dark matter “bumping” the nucleus of an atom of germanium, producing a detectable vibration.
“This is a very exciting time for our field,” says assistant professor Vuc Mandic, who is involved with the project.
“The coming decade will likely see the direct detection of dark matter, even if our experiment may have only seen a background fluctuation.”
University of Minnesota news: www1.umn.edu/news/
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If the dark matter comprises 25% of the stuff of the universe, you would think it be easier to detect. After all it been searched for by teams of scientist using multimillion dollar detectors for over 16 years. It could be that we have been hoodwinked by an artifact for the last 300 years in the same way that the Scholastics were hoodwinked for 1000 years by an artifact due the earth rotating on its axis every 24 hours. That artifact gave the false impression that all the objects in the Heavens rotated around the earth in 24 hour period.
The artifact that we may have been misled by is due to the close association between mass and luminosity. It is altogether possible that it is the luminosity that is doing the gravitational attraction and not the mass. In other words, it could be the sun’s warmth and not its mass that is attracting the planets. This possibility can be easily determined with experimental equipment that costs around $100. Go to http://vixra.org/abs/0907.0018 and there you will find 5 experiments which show that when heat transfers through a test mass its weight will either increase of decrease depending on whether the heat flows up or down through the test mass. The percentage change in weight of these test masses ranges from 2 % to 16%. It time to start thinking about the dark matter and dark energy problem and stop spending close to billion dollars clinging to the Standard Model. Being hoodwinked by an artifact for 300 years is better that being hoodwinked for a 1000 years.