https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Determining the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have narrowed down the possibilities for one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). https://phys.org/news/2025-09-world-sensitive-detector-tightens-net.html General Physics Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:20:05 EDT news678370116 One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to reveal the nature of dark matter. We know it exists (it constitutes more than 85% of the matter in the universe), but we have never seen it directly and still do not know what it is. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-antimatter-cosmic-rays-reopen-wimps.html Astronomy Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:02 EDT news647165522 Figuring out the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have narrowed down possibilities for one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-dark.html Astronomy Mon, 26 Aug 2024 14:16:04 EDT news643900561 Matter surrounds us day and night in all its forms—trees, houses, furniture, and even the air we breathe. But, according to physicists, the visible matter familiar to us may only account for approximately 20 percent of all material in the universe. According to the current theory, as much as 80 percent may be dark matter. This claim is based on several observations, one of which is that stars and galaxies rotate much faster than they would if there were only 'normal' matter present in the universe. https://phys.org/news/2019-07-tracking-dark.html General Physics Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:04:09 EDT news481291440 Almost 20 years ago, the DAMA/LIBRA experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory—LNGS began publishing data showing that it had detected a signal modulation produced by an interaction with the Milky Way's dark matter halo. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-detector-would-be-evidence-dark.html Astronomy Thu, 24 Jan 2019 07:55:22 EST news467538914 A team of researchers from Universidad de Zaragoza, King's College London and the Institute of Astronomy in the U.K. has found that a "dark matter hurricane" passing through our solar system offers a better than usual chance of detecting axions. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D, the group describes their findings and why they believe their observations could offer help in understanding dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2018-11-dark-hurricane-chance-axions.html General Physics Tue, 13 Nov 2018 08:30:01 EST news461315567 The intensive, worldwide search for dark matter, the missing mass in the universe, has so far failed to find an abundance of dark, massive stars or scads of strange new weakly interacting particles, but a new candidate is slowly gaining followers and observational support. https://phys.org/news/2017-12-machos-dead-wimps-no-showsay-simps.html General Physics Mon, 04 Dec 2017 16:37:41 EST news431627844 Invisible, imperceptible and yet far more common than ordinary matter, dark matter makes up an astounding 85 percent of the universe's mass. Physicists are slowly but steadily tracking down the nature of this unidentified substance. The latest result from the PICO experiment places some of the best limits yet on the properties of certain types of dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2017-05-astronomers-wimps.html General Physics Tue, 23 May 2017 07:30:02 EDT news414742856 Researchers have come a step closer to building one of the world's best dark matter detectors: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently signed off on the conceptual design of the proposed LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment and gave the green light for the procurement of some of its components. DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a key member of the LZ collaboration, is setting up a test stand for the detector prototype and a facility to purify liquid xenon, which will be the detector's "eye" for dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2015-05-slac-gears-dark-lux-zeplin.html General Physics Thu, 21 May 2015 08:30:43 EDT news351415829 "What really impressed me was the trip down," said astrophysicist James Buckley, PhD, speaking of the vertical mile he traveled to get to the site of an underground dark-matter experiment. "You can see you're moving at a pretty good clip, which, by the way, is three times slower than the cage used to drop when it was a mine. It took us 10 minutes to get down a mile. You just watch the earth flashing by and every once in a while you go past a boarded up tunnel." https://phys.org/news/2014-12-dark-gold.html General Physics Tue, 09 Dec 2014 07:20:02 EST news337330577 (Phys.org) —China's PandaX Dark Matter Experiment is in final preparations to begin operating sometime early this year, representatives for the project have told the press. Its mission is to capture evidence of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) colliding with the nucleus of a xenon atom—evidence of dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2014-01-china-pandax-wimp-detector.html General Physics Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:30:02 EST news310376662 (Phys.org) —In a laboratory under a mountain 80 miles east of Rome this fall, a Princeton-led international team switched on a new experiment aimed at finding a mysterious substance that makes up a quarter of the universe but has never been seen. https://phys.org/news/2014-01-darkside-aims-particles-dark.html General Physics Fri, 17 Jan 2014 08:50:01 EST news309170346 (Phys.org) —Determining the mass of dark matter particles requires accounting for several factors, one of which is the velocity distribution of the particles. Most current estimates of dark matter mass involve assumptions regarding the velocity distribution, since this distribution involves a high degree of uncertainty. In a new paper, physicists have presented a model-independent method for determining the dark matter mass that doesn't require any assumptions about the velocity distribution, marking the first time that the dark matter mass can be accurately measured in an unbiased way. The physicists predict that this tool will be invaluable for the analysis of future experimental data. https://phys.org/news/2013-07-model-independent-dark-mass-future-discoveries.html General Physics Mon, 29 Jul 2013 14:00:01 EDT news294323460 (Phys.org) —Now that it looks like the hunt for the Higgs boson is over, particles of dark matter are at the top of the physics "Most Wanted" list. Dozens of experiments have been searching for them, but often come up with contradictory results. https://phys.org/news/2013-05-theorists-dark.html General Physics Wed, 22 May 2013 08:25:01 EDT news288429886 (Phys.org) —Researchers working at the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) facility, located underground in Minnesota's Soudan Mine, are reporting in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv that they've found three events that lie in the signal range of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The group also gave a talk detailing their results to an audience at this year's American Physical Society meeting—as part of that discussion, they made it clear the noted events do not rise to the level of discovery, nor do they imply the team has found evidence of the existence of dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2013-04-super-cdms-evidence-wimps.html General Physics Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:09:02 EDT news285311318 Scientists from the XENON collaboration announced a new result from their search for dark matter. The analysis of data taken with the XENON100 detector during 13 months of operation at the Gran Sasso Laboratory (Italy) provided no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading dark matter candidates. Two events being observed are statistically consistent with one expected event from background radiation. Compared to their previous 2011 result the world-leading sensitivity has again been improved by a factor of 3.5. This constrains models of new physics with WIMP candidates even further and it helps to target future WIMP searches. A paper with the results is going to be submitted to Physical Review Letters and on the arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2012-07-xenon100-limits-dark.html General Physics Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:20:40 EDT news262002021 Although it's invisible, dark matter accounts for at least 80 percent of the matter in the universe. No one knows what it is, but most scientists would bet on weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. https://phys.org/news/2012-05-lying-wimps-sensitivity-large-underground.html General Physics Wed, 23 May 2012 13:31:51 EDT news256998676 (Phys.org) -- Katherine Freese and Christopher Savage from the University of Michigan and Stockholm University respectively have embarked on a whimsical bit of physics research. They’ve been estimating the number of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), thought by some to be instances of dark matter; that stuff that fills in the holes in physics theories that can’t be explained any other way, that likely strike the human body on a yearly or even minute by minute basis. They have found, as they describe in their paper they’ve uploaded to the preprint sever arXiv, that in their estimation, billions of WIMPS pass through every human body on Earth every second. But only a small fraction of those actually hit something such as the nuclei of an oxygen or hydrogen atom. They say most assumptions about dark matter would put the collision rate at something like thirty times a year. If new data is taken into account however, they suggest the hit rate could be closer to 100,000 a year, or one every minute or so. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-duo-wimps-bodies.html General Physics Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:13:43 EDT news253347195 (PhysOrg.com) -- There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this "dark matter" really is. Many scientists think it's likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-fermi-dwarf-galaxies-insights-dark.html Astronomy Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:52:19 EDT news252607920 Researchers from the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and other European groups have studied the effects of the presence of dark matter in the Sun. According to their calculations, low mass dark matter particles could be transferring energy from the core to the external parts of the Sun, which would affect the quantity of neutrinos that reach the Earth. https://phys.org/news/2010-12-dark-energy-sun.html General Physics Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:08:39 EST news210427701 (PhysOrg.com) -- Much of the matter in our universe may be made of a type of dark matter called weakly interacting massive particles, better known as WIMPs. Although some scientists predict that these hypothetical particles possess many of the necessary properties to account for dark matter, so far scientists have not been able to make any definite predictions of their mass. Now, in a new study, physicists have derived a limit on the WIMP mass by calculating how these dark matter particles can transform neutron stars into stars made of strange quark matter, or "strange" stars. https://phys.org/news/2010-10-mass-limits-dark-derived-strange.html General Physics Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:39:46 EDT news206095162 The Sun could be the best place to look for dark matter - the invisible ‘stuff’ that is thought to make up about 83% of the matter in the Universe. https://phys.org/news/2010-07-sun-dark.html General Physics Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:38:00 EDT news198221838 (PhysOrg.com) -- Deep in a mine 230 stories underground, physicists are trying to detect dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly a quarter of the universe. Last December, tantalizing rumors of a major discovery by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) set the physics world abuzz. The Caltech collaborators describe their experiment. https://phys.org/news/2010-06-dark.html General Physics Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:20:01 EDT news196531263 Physicists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive. https://phys.org/news/2010-02-dark-background-noise-results-intriguing.html General Physics Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:00:14 EST news185118561 A team of researchers led by a Case Western Reserve University physicist is planning the world's largest, most sensitive experiment to catch the stuff of dark matter, stuff that's proved way beyond invisible. https://phys.org/news/2009-10-dark-sleuths-world-largest-wimp.html General Physics Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:02 EDT news176041529 (PhysOrg.com) -- Determining the identity of dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe, is one of the most fundamental challenges facing modern physics. Through theory and experiment, scientists have been gradually determining what dark matter probably isn't composed of, and now recent results from one collaboration have ruled out another possibility. https://phys.org/news/2009-01-limits-dark.html General Physics Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:13:52 EST news152284387