dark matter

In November of last year, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory switched on Roadrunner, the world's fastest computer. IBM and the Department of Energy built the machine to model nuclear explosions, but two new studies, both released today, are proof that the computer's massive power has been at least as devoted to peaceful science as to simulating thermonuclear weapons.

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Scientists at Case Western Reserve University, Brown University, and several other collaborators are building an underground science lab where, in a 300-kilogram tank filled with liquid xenon, they hope to find dark matter -- the material that scientists believe was instrumental in helping to form the universe.

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For astrophysicists, evidence of dark matter has always seemed to dangle just beyond the grasp of their evidence. Their theories predict it, the motion of galaxies implies it, but direct observation of this caliginous material remains elusive.

Now, new data from NASA's latest space telescope has sparked debate about whether or not dark matter has finally been observed.

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A new simulation has mapped out the way dark matter—the invisible heft of the universe—could be distributed in a galaxy like our own Milky Way; showing that dark matter could be much more present in our neighborhood than previously thought, and suggesting that we may soon be able to detect it (and understand it) close to home.

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Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

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The title of the paper might not jump out at the average science fan—Search for Axionlike Particles Using a Variable-Baseline Photon-Regeneration Technique—but the big idea behind the research certainly should. Physicists at Fermilab have designed an experiment to look for the particles that may make up dark matter—the elusive material that may make up most of the matter in the universe.

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Scientists at Rice University and RPI have created a thin, nanotube-laden coating that they say is the darkest material ever made by man. Radiation essentially gets lost in a miniature wilderness of carbon nanotubes that lets light in, then traps it. The coating absorbs 99.9 percent of incoming light; the previous best measured around 99.84 percent.

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