Traces of New Dark Matter Candidate Could be Found in Crystals Deep Inside the Earth
An Anonymous Coward writes:
From New Atlas
Although it outnumbers regular matter by a ratio of five to one, dark matter is frustratingly elusive. Many experiments have been and are being run to try to hunt down different types of candidate particles, but so far no direct trace has been found of any of them. Now, researchers from Max Planck have proposed a new hypothetical particle that might be behind dark matter - the superheavy gravitino - and outlined just how we might find them.
As far back as the 1930s, astronomers began to notice that galaxies are moving much faster than they should be, based on the mass we could see. Calculations led to the conclusion that there must be far more mass out there that we couldn't see, and this hypothetical invisible stuff became known as dark matter.
[...] But what's particularly interesting is that if superheavy gravitinos are real, we could find traces of them using the Earth itself as a giant detector. After all, we're bound to have had plenty of them pass through the planet in the last 4.5 billion years. And if they did, they should have left fingerprints behind.
Because superheavy gravitinos would interact with regular matter through the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces, they could leave ionization tracks in rocks. The problem is, they might be difficult to distinguish from the paths of other particles.
See article abstracts in Physical Review letters and in Physical Review D.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.