Scientists take ‘remarkable’ step towards discovering true nature of dark matter

Scientists may have taken a giant step towards solving one of the great mysteries of astronomy – what the “dark matter” thought to make up 85 per cent of the Universe actually is.

The existence of this vast amount of mysterious unseen material is needed to explain the way galaxies rotate.

If they only consisted of the stars we can see, the forces involved would see stars flying off in all directions. The extra mass, and therefore extra gravity, is required to explain why this does not happen.

In 1977, researchers came up with a theory that dark matter consisted of hypothetical particles called axions, much like Professor Peter Higgs’s proposal for a hypothetical particle to explain why things have mass in the 1960s. The discovery of the “Higgs boson” at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2013 resulted in a Nobel Prize for Professor Higgs, of Edinburgh University, and Belgian physicist Francois Englert.

Actual evidence of the axion has remained elusive over the decades.

But now researchers have used a supercomputer to calculate what the mass of an axion would be if it does make up most dark matter.

They found it would be between 50 and 1,500 micro-electronvolts – or up to 10 billion times lighter than an electron, according to a paper in the journal Nature.

This crucial bit of evidence will allow physicists to search for this incredibly tiny particle in the real world. Finding out the nature of dark matter would be on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson.

[link to www.independent.co.uk]