Galaxy clusters back Einstein, leave Newton’s descendants in the cold
Relativity is the reigning theory of gravity. In situations where we can measure it directly, such as binary neutron stars, its predictions match the real world with remarkable precision. And, when supplemented with...
Now you see it, now you don’t—dark matter detection wars
Dark matter has been a polarizing subject. It hasn't been detected, the name implied it was a mystery, and it started out as an explanation for the apparent extra but invisible mass in galaxies. But...
Feature: Insert <discovery> here: the role of placeholders in science
The comments appear like clockwork every time there's a discussion of the Universe's dark side, for both dark matter and dark energy. At least some readers seem positively incensed by the idea that scientists can happily accept...
Theorists seek dark matter in hot neutron stars
Dark matter is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. We have lots of gravitational evidence for the presence of dark matter. In fact, the evidence is from so many different types of observations, and is all so consistent, that...
Week in science: explosives, dark matter, GM salmon
New explosives get bigger bang for the buck with extra oxygen: Using a simple chemical reaction, chemists created a new class of explosives that could be an improvement over existing materials like TNT and RDX.
Neutron stars may ...
Neutron stars may go completely strange thanks to dark matter
There is nothing like observational data, or the lack thereof, to get physicists thinking. We have a fair bit of indirect evidence for dark matter, but we are not really sure what dark matter is. This uncertainty provides the...
Is it now or never for dark matter WIMPs?
For several decades, astronomers and cosmologists have been piling up data that indicates most of the matter in the Universe is dark, interacting only via gravity. As modified theories of gravity failed to account for observatio...
Astronomers staring at the sun hope to see dark matter
The evidence for dark matter has come from big objects, generally starting at galaxy-sized and going up from there to the structure of the Universe itself. But a paper in today's issue of Science indicates that...
Searching through the LHC data flood for dark matter
As we mentioned in recent coverage, a hypothesis called supersymmetry is one of the leading candidates to fix the problems that have appeared in the Standard Model, which explains the behavior of the fundamental components of mat...
Astronomy and particle physics race to replace Standard Model
If energy issues seem to be attracting the attention of a lot of physicists, the Large Hadron Collider seems to be drawing the attention of many of the rest of them, including people in fields...
Recent observations show dark matter unobserved again
One of the things that isn't widely advertised in science is that progress often looks a bit like this video—things get done, but the results are rarely quite what you expect. A...
Germanium puck detects potential dark matter signal
Detecting the presence of dark matter in space is rather easy, but that doesn't tell us what dark matter actually is. Scientists may have had better luck in a Minnesota mine: projects occupying the mine are using ultracold pucks of material to detect dark matter interactions, and may be seeing the...
