Have Scientists Found Dark Matter? 4 Things To Know About The Possible Discovery

One of the biggest hypothesis in astronomy is the existence of dark matter and up until now, scientists have spent a great deal of time and resources trying to discover it. Essentially, without discovering black dark matter, there is no evidence of its existence. Given the non-concrete nature of dark matter -- it is invisible and intangible -- it also is one of the biggest mysteries in our universe. But now a theoretical physicist at Queen Mary University of London has supposedly discovered dark matter. "I started thinking not about the behavior of single axions, but [about] the collective behavior of many axions coupled together," said Christian Beck, as reported by SPACE.com. Here are four things to know about dark matter and its reported recent discovery:

1. What is dark matter? "First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see," writes NASA about what exactly dark matter is. "Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 27 percent required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25 percent dark matter contribution."

2. How can it be discovered? Beck suggests using equations similar to that used for S/N/S Josephson junction, to make a superconductor separated by a thin layer of metal. Using this, the axions of dark matter would theoretically leave an electrical signal behind. "This opens up a new way of searching for axions that people haven't thought about before," he said.

3. How is Beck's process different? Previously, scientists had been using massive sensor arrays buried underground to catch the signals of dark matters, but this endeavour has been unsuccessful. What Beck suggests, that is different from previous attempts, is using smaller benchtop detectors to better detect the dark matter fingerprints, called axions. This idea came to Beck after taking into consideration the Bose-Einstein theory, which suggests that axions condense together forming super-particles.

4. When was it discovered? Beck's theory is just a theory and he has yet to actually test it out. But if this theory is true, then the evidence may have already been collected in a 2004 experient that was looking into noise levels in the S/N/S Josephson junctions, where a signal of unknown origin was discovered. And should this signal originate from an axion, then the fingerprint of dark matter have a mass less than four-billionths of an electron.

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