rhamphotheca: Cold Dead Stars Could Help Limit...

23rd November 2011

Photo reblogged from fauna with 67 notes

rhamphotheca:

Cold Dead Stars Could Help Limit Dark Matter
by Lisa Grossman

Hunting for cold stellar corpses near the center of the galaxy or in star clusters could put new limits on the properties of dark matter.
“You can exclude a big class of theories that the experiments cannot exclude just by observing the temperature of a neutron star,” said physicist Chris Kouvaris of the University of Southern Denmark, lead author of a paper in the Sept. 28 Physical Review D. “Maybe by observations, which come cheaper than expensive experiments, we might get some clues about dark matter.”
Dark matter is the irritatingly invisible stuff that makes up some 23 percent of the universe, but makes itself known only through its gravitational tug on ordinary matter.
There are several competing theories about what dark matter actually is, but one of the most widely pursued is a hypothetical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). Physicists in search of WIMPs have placed experimental detectors deep underground in mines and mountains, and are waiting for a dark matter particle to hit them.
Others have proposed looking for the buildup of dark matter in stars like the sun or white dwarfs. But both subterranean and stellar-detection strategies will light up only for WIMPs larger than a certain size. That size is miniscule — about a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a square centimeter — but dark matter particles could be smaller still…
(read more: Wired Science)
(image: artist’s impression of a Magnetar, NASA)

Cold Dead Stars Could Help Limit Dark Matter

by Lisa Grossman

Hunting for cold stellar corpses near the center of the galaxy or in star clusters could put new limits on the properties of dark matter.

“You can exclude a big class of theories that the experiments cannot exclude just by observing the temperature of a neutron star,” said physicist Chris Kouvaris of the University of Southern Denmark, lead author of a paper in the Sept. 28 Physical Review D. “Maybe by observations, which come cheaper than expensive experiments, we might get some clues about dark matter.”

Dark matter is the irritatingly invisible stuff that makes up some 23 percent of the universe, but makes itself known only through its gravitational tug on ordinary matter.

There are several competing theories about what dark matter actually is, but one of the most widely pursued is a hypothetical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). Physicists in search of WIMPs have placed experimental detectors deep underground in mines and mountains, and are waiting for a dark matter particle to hit them.

Others have proposed looking for the buildup of dark matter in stars like the sun or white dwarfs. But both subterranean and stellar-detection strategies will light up only for WIMPs larger than a certain size. That size is miniscule — about a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a square centimeter — but dark matter particles could be smaller still…

(read more: Wired Science)

(image: artist’s impression of a Magnetar, NASA)

Tagged: science dark matter

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Source: rhamphotheca

Lizie Moon