From Nature World News, May 20, 2020: Two studies have shown evidence of how a larger satellite galaxy can draw smaller ones into them as they get “trapped” into orbiting the Milky Way. Such an arrangement can inform astronomers and researchers about the nature of the formation of galaxies as well as insights into dark matter and its nature. Fermilab scientist Alex Drlica-Wagner is featured.
dark matter
Experimentalists and theorists search for Higgs bosons escaping as dark matter.
Hector Carranza Jr. of the University of Texas at Arlington has received the prestigious Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research award, or SCGSR, to conduct his research at Fermilab. DOE awarded the fellowship to 62 students from U.S. universities. He will work on light-mass dark matter searches at the ICARUS neutrino experiment.
From Gizmodo, May 5, 2020: Fermilab scientist Brian Nord weighs in on the question of how automated devices, such as an autonomously operating telescope, free from human biases and complications, could find the solutions to questions about dark matter and dark energy.
From Live Science, April 29, 2020: One of the deepest mysteries in physics could be explained by a long-since vanished form of dark matter. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper is one of the authors of the new result. If an ancient form of dark matter decayed out of existence, that loss would have decreased the mass of the universe, which would have led to less gravity holding the universe together, which would have affected the speed at which the universe expands — helping explain the disagreement between measurements of the universe’s expansion.
From Physics World, March 24, 2020: Scientists using the first year of data from the Dark Energy Survey, which is led by Fermilab, establish that there is a correlation between the positions of gravitational lenses — deduced from the stretching of distant galaxies — and gamma-ray photons. A data comparison from gravitational lensing and gamma-ray observations reveals that regions of the sky with greater concentrations of matter emit more gamma rays.
From Event Horizon podcast, March 19, 2020: Fermilab scientist James Annis and John Michael Godier discuss neutrinos, dark energy, dark matter and upcoming cosmological surveys in this 30-minute interview.
From Gizmodo, Feb. 19, 2020: Sensor limits have driven one dark matter-hunting team to build a dark matter detector from the same guts as a quantum computer. Their device under construction at Fermilab solidifies extreme sensing as one of present-day quantum technology’s best real-world applications.
From Cold Facts, Feb. 13, 2020: The Cryogenic Society of America picks up Fermilab’s story on the new SuperCDMS dilution refrigerator at SNOLAB near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.