Scientists are searching for dark matter inside a titanium tank filled with rare liquified gas in a former gold mine.
The invisible stuff makes up most of the universe's mass, but scientists don't know what it is The race to solve the enormous mystery has brought one team to the depths.
Kevin Lesko said that the question for scientists is basic. What is this place like? It's a mystery right now.
The idea is that a mile of dirt and rock, a giant tank, a second tank and the purest titanium in the world will block a lot of the rays and particles that come and go. Scientists think that dark matter particles can be avoided. They hope one will fly into the vat of liquid xenon in the inner tank and smash into a xenon nucleus like two balls in a game of pool, revealing its existence in a flash of light seen by a device called "the time projection chamber".
The five-year, $60 million search finally began two months ago after a delay caused by the Pandemic. The device has yet to find anything. No dark matter.
They say that's okay. The equipment seems to be able to remove most of the background radiation. To find a rare type of interaction, the first thing to do is to get rid of all of the ordinary sources of radiation.
They think they will see a few fleeting signs of dark matter a year. The scientists think they will get 20 times more data over the next two years.
Hugh Lippincott, a physicist and spokesman for the experiment, said in a Thursday news conference that the chance of finding dark matter with this device is less than half.
Lesko said that it was far from a sure thing. You don't go into rare search physics without a chance to find something.
Two hulking Depression-era hoists run an elevator that brings scientists to a research facility. There is a tunnel with cool-to-the-touch walls. The old musty mine leads to a high tech lab where dirt andContamination is the enemy. A double layer of baby blue booties go over steel-toed safety boots when helmets are exchanged.
Lead engineer Jeff Cherwinka said in a December tour that the cryostat is the heart of the experiment. It was designed to keep the liquid xenon cold and keep the background radiation at a minimum.
"Xen is special because it allows researchers to see if a collision is with one of its electrons or with its nucleus." He said that the dark matter that everyone is looking for is the nucleus.
The scientists tried a smaller experiment a long time ago. They thought they had to go bigger. There is a large-scale experiment going on in Italy but no results have been announced.
Scientists are trying to understand why the universe doesn't seem right.
Dark matter has a lot of the mass in the universe. Astronomers know it is there because they find that there is not enough gravity to hold these clusters together. If there wasn't anything else out there, the universe would be torn apart.
It is not possible to comprehend history without dark matter.
The physicist said that we would not be here without dark matter.
There's a lot of doubt about what dark matter is. There is a theory that it involves weakly interacting massive particles.
If that is the case, they could be detected. We want to find out where the women are hiding.
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