Researchers seek to hunt for dark matter in the heart of ancient rocks

Only 5% of the universe is made up of matter as we know it: from stars and planets to the smallest particles. The rest of the universe is filled with what we call “dark matter.”

According to Tekna Technology Media Astronomy News Service, a team led by Virginia Tech University is trying to find out this ancient secret of the universe. Instead of telescopes or particle accelerators, they travel to the heart of billion-year-old rocks. By forming an international team of different scientists, physicist Patrick Haber has taken a completely new approach to the discovery of dark matter. With significant financial support, they are building a state-of-the-art laboratory to challenge various theories about dark matter.

Scientists hypothesize the existence of dark matter because galaxies rotate around their center much faster than expected. This extra force can only be justified by the existence of invisible matter. Dark matter, unlike normal matter, hardly interacts with anything else and is therefore very difficult to detect. The only possible way to detect dark matter is to observe it collide with the nuclei of ordinary matter atoms. In this collision, a lot of energy is released. Scientists have been searching for evidence of these rare encounters for decades, but so far have been unsuccessful. Now, they have turned to the depths of the earth.

If dark matter exists, it probably collided with the nuclei of atoms in rocks over billions of years. Therefore, it may be possible to find traces of these collisions by examining very old rocks. This idea, which was first proposed in the 1980s, has been rekindled by scientists with new technological advances. Patrick Haber and his team are developing new technologies to detect these tiny traces in the crystal structure of rocks. They hope that by using this technology, they will be able to answer one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

One of the biggest challenges of this research is the presence of natural radioactive radiation on Earth, which can be confused with signals from dark matter collisions. For this reason, scientists must choose stones that have the least amount of radiation. This research, in addition to helping to better understand dark matter, can also have other applications. For example, the technologies developed in this project can be used in various fields such as medicine and nuclear security.
To see the latest news, refer to the scientific news page of Tekna Media.