Operating at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2022, the FASER experiment is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that are attempting to solve outstanding problems in physics such as the nature of dark matter and the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe.
BREAD’s innovative approach to dark matter detection uses a coaxial “dish” antenna to scan for mysterious particles.
One of the great mysteries of modern science is dark matter. We know dark matter exists thanks to its effects on other objects in the cosmos, but we have never been able to directly see it. And it’s no minor thing—currently, scientists think it makes up about 85% of all the mass in the universe.
A new experiment by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection or BREAD, has released its first results in the search for dark matter in a study published in Physical Review Letters. Though they did not find dark matter, they narrowed the constraints for where it might be and demonstrated a unique approach that may speed up the search for the mysterious substance, at relatively little space and cost.
The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared with a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.
The preliminary findings are far from confirmed, but if they hold up, it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy — and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.
These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the U.S. state of Arizona.
If you were to throw a message in a bottle into a black hole, all of the information in it, down to the quantum level, would become completely scrambled. Because in black holes this scrambling happens as quickly and thoroughly as quantum mechanics allows. They are generally considered nature’s ultimate information scramblers.
Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein calculated the entropy of a black hole in the 1970s, but it took physicists until now to figure out the quantum effects that make the formula work.
By Leah Crane