Space station's dark matter hunter coy about findings

What a tease. A high-profile dark matter-hunting experiment that sits atop the International Space Station allegedly has interesting results ? but its researchers are not telling.

On 17 February, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who designed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), was due to announce the results at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. But instead he told a disappointed group of reporters and scientists that his team would wait till the work was published in a journal.

AMS launched on the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavour in May 2011, with the goal of catching whiffs of exotic matter. That includes dark matter, which supposedly makes up about 80 per cent of the universe's matter. According to leading theories, it is made of as-yet-undetected particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles.

Disappointment impossible

These WIMPs should collide in space, destroying each other in a puff of electrons and their antimatter partner, positrons. So if AMS picks up more positrons than expected from normal processes, that would suggest the presence of dark matter.

Ting wouldn't say whether or not AMS has seen such a signal, but did reveal that it has detected 7.7 billion electrons and positrons. That should be enough to suggest, or rule out, a signal at lower energies. "There's no such thing as disappointing," said Ting, who plans to submit the work for publication in about two weeks.

Cosmologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago, who is not on the AMS team, is looking forward to hearing the results. If the device picks up more positrons than expected from normal processes, that would be a "smoking gun signature" of dark matter, he says.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/28ba58d6/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cdn231940Espace0Estations0Edark0Ematter0Ehunter0Ecoy0Eabout0Efindings0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

google play Christmas Story after christmas sales case mccoy