“A new sense means new ways to look at all the big questions in physics.”10 more words that mean something different to scientists.Scientists think that, under some circumstances, dark matter could generate powerful enough gravitational waves for equipment like LIGO to detect.Four physicists share their journeys through academia into industry and offer words of wisdom for those considering making a similar move.No one knows for sure what dark matter is. Dark matter is believed to be five times as prevalent as visible matter. It's also fascinating all by itself.Not only are we made of fundamental particles, we also produce them and are constantly bombarded by them throughout the day.What does it take to publish a scientific analysis in one of the world’s largest experiments?The ADMX experiment trains scientists to deal with real signals—by creating fake ones.Although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions.The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be named for an influential astronomer who left the field better than she found it.Early-career physicist Jonathan LeyVa is helping to build one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors.An Italian experiment has a 20-year signal of what could be dark matter—and scientists are embarking on their most promising efforts yet to confirm or refute its results.Maria Elena Monzani prepares an international team to search for clues to one of the biggest scientific mysteries.Dark matter could be much lower in mass and slighter in energy than previously thought.Use your browser’s print dialog box to create a pdf.Symmetry receives funding through the US Department of Energy. “Constraints are important,” says Ann Nelson, a physics professor at the University of Washington.
“Gravitational waves are like a completely new sense for science,” Ali-Haimoud says. Both dark matter and dark energy are theories to explain anomalies in gravitation for objects at the galaxy scale of measurement.Do you have any questions, comments, or opinions on this subject?
If those stars then merged, the changes in the axion “cloud” would be visible in the gravitational wave signal. “I think it’s an interesting theory, as interesting as a new kind of particle,” says Yacine Ali-Haimoud, an assistant professor of physics at New York University. Instead of being anti-gravitation, it could be a characteristic of space or perhaps some other unknown force that is applicable for only extremely large masses.Some feel that dark energy implies that the General Relativity Theory does not apply in certain situations.Dark matter and dark energy affect gravitation in opposite ways. Chuck Horowitz, Maria Alessandra Papa and Reddy recently analyzed LIGO’s data and found no indication of compact dark objects of a specific mass range within Earth, Jupiter or the sun. Instead, it is one of many efforts to explain the increased rate of expansion of the Universe.The idea of invisible matter and energy is troubling to scientists and astronomers. Scientists and astronomers have calculated that the expansion would slow down with time, due to the mutual gravitational attraction between the galaxies. These pockets of dense matter—mostly photons at this point in the universe—might have collapsed under their own gravity and formed early black holes. Like objects of different weights on a blanket, objects of different masses have different effects on the fabric of spacetime. However, measurements of the velocities of the outer suns resulted in much higher values than expected for the mass determined from the luminosity measurements.In order for the suns to remain in orbit for the measured velocities, the mass of the galaxy would have to be much higher.