Scientists are pretty sure the invisible stuff makes up most of the universe’s mass and say we wouldn’t be here without it, but they don’t know what it is. The race to solve this enormous mystery has brought one team to the depths under Lead, South Dakota.
LEAD, S.D. — In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquified gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.
Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars Scientists announced Thursday that the five-year, $60 million search finally got underway two months ago after a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So far the device has found ... nothing. At least no dark matter.
By the time the experiment finishes, the chance of finding dark matter with this device is “probably less than 50% but more than 10%,” said Hugh Lippincott, a physicist and spokesman for the experiment in a Thursday news conference. The heart of the experiment is the giant tank called the cryostat, lead engineer Jeff Cherwinka said in a December 2019 tour before the device was closed and filled. He described it as “like a thermos” made of “perhaps the purest titanium in the world” designed to keep the liquid xenon cold and keep background radiation at a minimum.
“It is essentially impossible to understand our observation of history, of the evolutionary cosmos without dark matter,” Manalaysay said.
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