For example, while many of the functions that keep cells alive and ticking are conducted by proteins with clearly defined shapes, many other functions are governed by a structureless class of proteins known as intrinsically disordered regions. Researchers may have a broad understanding about the biology and chemistry of cells, but there is much that they do not know. They consume nutrients and make proteins. Hence scientists continuing efforts to discover its true nature.It is tempting to think we understand cells. But if it were not for dark matter’s pervasive gravitational influence, galaxies and stars and planets would not have held together in the early universe and life as we know it would not have evolved. Such efforts to find a form of matter that can scarcely interact with normal matter may seem unnecessary. So we will have to be a lot more sophisticated in our attempts at detection.” Or it could be made of something that’s a million times lighter than a wimp and detecting that will be very hard. “Dark matter could be a lot weirder than we have assumed so far. “It could be that in looking for wimps, we’re looking for our keys under the street lamp,” added Ghag. Making their machines even more sensitive would result in them being swamped by signals triggered by another type of subatomic particle, the neutrino, which rain down on the Earth in their trillions every second. If Lux-Zeplin and XENONnT fail to find Wimps, the two teams of scientists will have one final chance to use current technology to find them – by joining forces to create one final super-large detector that would contain tens of tonnes of xenon, a rare and expensive gas to isolate, and which would be run for several years.Īnd if that last-chance detector fails to find dark matter, scientists would be stumped. The Lux-Zeplin detector being sealed before being placed underground. As Mariangela Lisanti, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, stated in the journal Science recently: “The wimp hypothesis will face its real reckoning after these next-generation detectors run.” However, it is now accepted there is a prospect that this will not happen and dark matter could remain elusive. Essentially, the more xenon we have in our machines and the longer we run our detectors, the better our prospects of collisions occurring and dark matter revealing its presence.” If not, both devices will be run without interruption for several years. We may find we have detected dark matter over that period – which would be very good news. Ghag, a member of the Lux-Zeplin team, said: “Both devices are now being put through operational tests, and in a few months those trials will be completed. Both devices have been filled with several tonnes of xenon – much more than has been put in any previous device – and that should increase chances of a nucleus being struck by a wimp. The other, Lux-Zeplin, has been constructed in an old South Dakota gold mine. One, built below Italy’s Gran Sasso mountains, is known as XENONnT. Now researchers are pinning their hopes on the two most sensitive wimp-hunters ever designed.
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“Despite years of effort, we have yet to see a single flash like that, however. “The expectation has been that a wimp will strike a xenon nucleus and the resulting flash of light will be spotted by a detector and so reveal the presence of a dark matter wimp,” said Ghag. These efforts have involved building detectors deep underground where they are shielded from subatomic particles – triggered by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere that constantly shower down on Earth and which would trigger streams of false positive readings on their instruments. These hypothetical particles are called wimps – weakly interacting massive particles – and for two decades researchers have strived to detect them.
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Vast numbers of undetected particles form invisible halos around galaxies and boost their gravitational fields, they argued.
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So scientists turned from the astronomically large to the incredibly small to explain the universe’s missing mass. However, new generations of powerful telescopes showed these were not viable possibilities. Astronomers initially thought it could be made up of stars too small or dim to be seen from Earth or by other candidates – such as neutron stars. The missing material generating the extra gravity needed to hold galaxies together was dubbed “dark matter”. Dark matter could be a lot weirder than we have assumed so far.’ Photograph: John Gaffen/Alamy Professor Chamkaur Ghag: ‘It could be that we’re looking for our keys under the street lamp.