The dark matter mystery deepens with the demise of a reported detection
A new experiment fails to support previous report of WIMPs in space
Contributing Correspondent
First of two parts. Read part two.
In mystery stories, the chief suspect almost always gets exonerated before the end of the book. Typically because a key piece of evidence turned out to be wrong.
In science, key evidence is supposed to be right. But sometimes it’s not. In the mystery of the invisible “dark matter” in space, evidence implicating one chief suspect has now been directly debunked. WIMPs, tiny particles widely regarded as prime dark matter candidates, have failed to appear in an experiment designed specifically to test the lone previous study claiming to detect them.
For decades, physicists have realized that most of the universe’s matter is nothing like earthly matter, which is made mostly from protons and neutrons. Gravitational influences on visible matter (stars and galaxies) indicate that some dark stuff of unknown identity pervades the cosmos. Ordinary matter accounts for less than 20 percent of the cosmic matter abundance.