Friday, July 22, 2016

No Dark Matter Detected

I'm of the opinion Dark Matter doesn't exist. News like this brightens my day:
It’s official: Scientists with the Large Underground Xenon dark-matter detector have combed through 20 months of pristine data and found, buried deep in the measurements ... nothing out of the ordinary.

The findings, presented at the Identification of Dark Matter conference in Sheffield, England, were not unexpected — though they do highlight the challenge of finding the elusive stuff known as dark matter.

“I couldn’t say with a straight face that I was expecting to find dark matter with this particular data set,” said Simon Fiorucci, an experimental physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and science coordination manager for LUX. “We were hoping for a good surprise, but we are not counting on good surprises.”

Dark matter can’t be seen, heard or felt – but scientists know something must be there because they watch how its enormous mass turbocharges the spin of galaxies. Everything we can detect in the universe, from Earth to the stars, black holes and distant galaxies – all of it makes up less than 5% of the mass and energy in the universe. Dark matter makes up nearly 27% (outnumbering normal matter by more than 5 to 1), and yet it has remained one of the most intractable mysteries of the cosmos for decades.

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