CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Yet More Idiots in Science: Re "Dark Matter"  Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:06 am | |
| Crystal bells stay silent as physicists look for dark matter
“With our new result we are leapfrogging the competition,” said Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, co-spokesperson of the CDMS experiment, for which the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the project management. “We have achieved the world’s most stringent limits on how often dark matter particles interact with ordinary matter and how heavy they are, in particular in the theoretically favored mass range of more than 40 times the proton mass. Our experiment is now sensitive enough to hear WIMPs even if they ring the ‘bells’ of our crystal germanium detector only twice a year. So far, we have heard nothing.”
WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, are leading candidates for the building blocks of dark matter, which accounts for 85 percent of the entire mass of the universe. Hundreds of billions of WIMPs may have passed through your body as you read these sentences.
“We were disappointed about not seeing WIMPs this time. But the absence of background in our sample shows the power of our detectors as we enter into very interesting territory,” said CDMS co-spokesperson Bernard Sadoulet, of the University of California, Berkeley.
If they exist, WIMPs might interact with ordinary matter at rates similar to those of low-energy neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles discovered in 1956.
“The nature of dark matter is one of the mysteries in particle physics and cosmology,” said Dr. Dennis Kovar, Acting Associate Director for High Energy Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Observations made with telescopes have repeatedly shown that dark matter exists.
“This is a fantastic result,” said UCLA professor David Cline, organizer of the conference.
http://www.physorg.com/news123163052.html
Bwahahaha!!! |
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CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
| | Subject: Add these idiots in science... Sun Apr 20, 2008 7:33 am | |
| Physicists say they found more signs of dark matter
A team of Italian and Chinese physicists renewed a claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe.
The team, called Dama, from "DArk MAtter," and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector more than a kilometer underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth's passage through a "wind" of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun. Other groups of hunters of dark matter have just as consistently failed to find any evidence of the putative particles.
At a meeting in Venice, Bernabei reported that a new, bigger experiment named Dama/Libra had now observed the same modulation. "No other experiment whose result can be directly compared in a model-independent way is available so far," she said. The findings increase the chances that the modulation is real, outside dark matter experts said.
Dark matter has taunted astronomers and physicists since the astronomer Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology pointed out in the 1930s that clusters of galaxies appear to be missing enough visible matter to hold them together gravitationally.
Speculation has centered on the possibility that the dark matter consists of hypothetical elementary particles left over from the Big Bang - so-called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, that are immune to most forces of nature and so can pass through us and the Earth like ghosts.
The Dama team uses sodium iodide, which flashes light when a WIMP smashes into it, as a detector. The first experiment, which ran from 1996 to 2002, had 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds, of sodium iodide; the second - which began in 2003 - 225 kilograms. In both cases, Bernabei and her colleagues found that the rate of flashes was highest in June and lowest in December.
Skepticism by the rest of the dark matter community about Dama's claims in 2000 led to hard feelings, apparent on the group's Web site, people.roma2.infn.it/dama/web/home.html.
Bernard Sadoulet, a rival dark matter hunter of the University of California, Berkeley, who was present at the conference, said of the new results, "The tension between the measurements of this group and the rest of the community is increasing."
He added that it would take time to digest Dama's results.
Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, a member of another dark matter hunting team, said people were excited about the new results.
"You wouldn't put your hand on fire that this is WIMPs," he said, but agreed that some kinds of WIMPs were still among many possibilities, including that the experiment was in error.
He said that it would take a lot of evidence from many different directions to crack the dark matter problem. When it is done, "We will see it was the work of a lot of people striking gold," he said, adding, "It is very tricky, what we are trying to do."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/healthscience/dark.php
The insanity continues...
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