An international collaboration, including Northwestern University, has reached a critical milestone in the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Located two kilometers below ground in Canada, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB has cooled to its operating temperature, the collaboration announced on March 17.
Just thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, the cryogenic experiment is about 100 times colder than the temperature of deep space. This extreme cold enables scientists to eliminate thermal noise from vibrating atoms, potentially isolating dark matter’s incredibly tiny signals.
With this milestone, the project transitions from building the experiment to preparing for the search. Researchers can now turn on the dark matter detectors, whose superconducting sensors only function when cooled to extremely low temperatures. If the equipment operates correctly, it should achieve the highest level of sensitivity yet for detecting low-mass particles, which have about half the mass of a single proton.
Dark matter makes up most of the matter in our Universe, yet its true nature remains one of the greatest mysteries in modern science. In this webinar, leading Cambridge researchers will explore how we’re uncovering the invisible.
Chaired by Professor Anthony Challinor, Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, this webinar brings together three Cambridge researchers on the front line of dark matter research:
Professor Ben Allanach (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics) Professor Hiranya Peiris (Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute for Cosmology) Dr Harry Cliff (Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics)
A brief blaze of gamma and X-ray light that lit up Earth telescopes in November 2024 may have come from an unexpected source.
Just a few seconds earlier, from the same tiny corner of the sky, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA had detected the telltale gravitational wave signal of two black holes colliding. These massive events are some of the most extreme in the Universe; even so, they’re not generally expected to produce detectable light.
A team led by astronomer Shu-Rui Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China has linked the extraordinary detection to an even more extraordinary set of possible circumstances: the collision, the researchers believe, may have taken place in the enormous, roiling disk of dust and gas surrounding a third, supermassive black hole – the host galaxy’s active galactic nucleus (AGN).
Neutrinos are extremely lightweight and electrically neutral particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter. Due to these rare interactions, neutrinos can travel across space almost entirely unaffected, carrying information about highly energetic cosmological events, such as exploding stars or supermassive black holes.
The KM3NeT neutrino telescope, an observatory located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, recently detected the presence of a neutrino carrying extremely high energy, above 100 PeV (peta-electronvolts). This is one of the most energetic neutrinos observed to date.
Theoretical predictions suggested that another large-scale neutrino detector, namely the IceCube detector, would also observe similar high-energy neutrino events. However, this did not happen, which might potentially hint at some new physics, such as a new type of neutrinos or non-standard interactions, that are not included in the standard model of physics.
Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 on the arXiv pre-print server, suggest that the cluster is embedded in a dark matter halo.
NGC 5,824 is an old globular cluster (GC) located some 104,000 light years away in the Milky Way’s outer halo. It has a mass of about 1 million solar masses, an age of 12.8 billion years and is the second brightest globular cluster of the outer halo clusters. NGC 5,824 is known to have a diffuse stellar envelope that extends beyond its tidal radius and symmetrically surrounds the cluster.
Given that the origin of the stars in this envelope and whether they remain gravitationally bound to the cluster center is still unclear, a team of astronomers led by Paula B. Díaz of the University of Chile decided to investigate NGC 5,824 by analyzing the data from the survey of the Milky Way outer halo satellites, based on the images acquired by CFHT and the Magellan Clay telescope. The study was complemented by data from ESA’s Gaia satellite.
Astronomers have identified the first clear evidence of a magnetar forming during a superluminous supernova, offering new insight into some of the brightest explosions in the universe.
A newly analyzed gravitational-wave event has revealed something unexpected about one of the Universe’s most violent encounters. Scientists have found the first strong evidence that a black hole and a neutron star collided while moving along an oval shaped orbit instead of the nearly perfect circ
Does the universe need observers to exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore questions about entropy, spontaneous symmetry breaking, spectroscopy and more with astrophysicist Charles Liu.
Does the universe require observers for information to exist? From Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation to modern neuroscience and philosophy, the crew explores whether measurement creates reality or reveals it. How does the double-slit experiment fit into this? Are wave and particle behaviors determined by how we measure them?
The conversation turns to information itself. What do physicists mean by “information”? How is entropy connected to hidden information in a system? We discuss entropy through everyday examples like coin flips, burning wood, and boiling water. How does this relate to quantum computing? We explore how astronomers separate cosmic redshift from stellar motion using spectroscopy, how interstellar dust and extinction curves complicate observations, and why mapping that dust is both a challenge and a source of discovery.
We discuss why the Big Bang didn’t form a black hole, how spontaneous symmetry breaking may have split the fundamental forces, and whether science can meaningfully investigate the universe’s earliest moments. Wrapping up, the team looks ahead to multi-messenger astronomy, next-generation telescope technology, exotic ideas about the speed of light, and how information continues to reshape what we know about the cosmos.
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Researchers have identified a potential mechanism that explains how turbulent plasma can produce the vast, ordered magnetic fields observed across the universe Cosmic magnetic fields are everywhere, but their origin has remained one of plasma astrophysics’ most persistent mysteries. Planets, star
Roger Penrose developed a radical new idea of how to think about fundamental physics, Twistor theory. here he gives a brief laypersons guide as to what it is and its implications are for cosmology and our place in the universe.
