The Dark Matter Detector in the Scottish Borders

The Dark Matter Detector in the Scottish Borders

Hunting for dark matter usually means building something enormous and burying it — a tank of liquid xenon in a mine, a magnet the size of a lorry, decades of engineering and a great deal of money. A team in Japan have just done it differently. They realised that the Earth's own magnetic field is larger than any magnet we could ever construct, and that the gap between the ground and the ionosphere behaves as a natural resonating cavity, ringing a…

First stellar stream beyond Milky Way opens new way to map dark matter

The first globular cluster stellar stream found beyond the Milky Way could provide a new way to map dark matter in distant galaxies.

Cosmic breadcrumb trail uncovers hidden dark matter

For billions of years, a globular cluster orbiting a distant galaxy has been slowly torn apart by gravity. The result is a faint, narrow ribbon of stars stretching through space—an ancient stellar stream that has now become the first of its kind detected beyond the Milky Way. The discovery, made using archival observations from NASA’s […]

Cosmic breadcrumb trail reveals hidden dark matter

Team expects future telescopes will find many more stellar streams, expanding the ability to probe dark matter across the universe.

MIT’s Jessica Fry Hunts For Axions, A Dark Matter Candidate

Jessica Fry, a fifth-year MIT PhD candidate, is searching for axions, a leading dark matter candidate, using experiments that detect faint electric currents.