As 2019 nears, physicists are hard at work on the next generation of dark matter detectors, and on parsing confusing data from detectors that already exist.
2018 was a big year for dark matter.
As usual, astronomers didn’t actually find any of the stuff, which is invisible to all our telescopes but appears to make up at least 80 percent of the universe by mass.
There were reports of a dark matter hurricane, but we can’t actually see it. A galaxy was discovered that seemed not to have any dark matter, which oddly would have proved dark matter existed. But then it turned out that the galaxy may have dark matter after all — leaving the existence of dark matter in doubt for some physicists. Multiple experiments that were supposed to directly detect dark matter here on Earth turned up nothing.
So, where does that leave scientists hunting for dark matter as we head into 2019? Pretty optimistic, all things considered. The hunt for dark matter presses forward on all fronts.
From massive underground detectors to huge sky surveys, here are the five major steps in the hunt for dark matter to look forward to in 2019.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the American detector that directly observed the first gravitational waves in 2015, will begin its third observation run in early 2019, collecting more data than ever before after a series of upgrades to its equipment.
So what’s a gravitational-wave detector doing in an article about dark matter? It turns out that there are a lot of tantalizing possibilities for uncovering hints of dark matter using gravitational-wave data — though none of them have yet been realized.
Researchers in 2018 proposed that if a « dark photon » with a very slight mass lurks somewhere in the universe, its signal might turn up in LIGO data, causing very specific irregularities in the signatures of gravitational waves.
