Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 13, 2017

Is Dark Matter Less 'Lumpy' Than Predicted?

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, the country's largest Large Hadron Collider research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your...

Jan 18, 2018

A Space Magnet, Hunting Dark Matter, Turns Up Juicy Secrets of Cosmic Rays

Somewhere far away in the universe, a star bursts and a cascade begins. Energy and small bits of matter speed away in every direction from the blooming supernova. They impact planets and other stars and crash into interstellar media, and some small portion of them reach Earth. These are primary...

Mar 28, 2018

Astrophysicists Claim They Found a 'Galaxy Without Dark Matter'

Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks. Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than...

Apr 6, 2018

Is Dark Matter Made Up of Mini Black Holes from the Big Bang?

Dark matter, the mysterious extra mass in the universe that emits no light yet exerts a gravitational pull, may actually be made up of primordial black holes that originated with the Big Bang. And these mini black holes can thank the Higgs boson for their birth — at least according...

May 19, 2018

What Can the Death of a Neutron Tell Us About Dark Matter?

(Inside Science) — Exactly how long a neutron lives is currently under debate. Now researchers suggest this mystery could be solved if neutrons sometimes decay into particles of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up more than four-fifths of all matter in the universe. A flurry of research...

Jun 2, 2018

Dark Matter May Have an Electric Charge

Dark matter, the stuff that's hypothesized to make up about a quarter of the universe yet doesn't seem to interact with light at all, could have a tiny electric charge, according to a new study. So far, dark matter has made its presence known only through gravity, by tugging on...

Jul 3, 2018

Remember That Dark-Matter-Free Galaxy? It May Have Dark Matter After All

A galaxy that is supposedly devoid of all dark matter might actually be full of it. And that, paradoxically, could mean dark matter doesn't exist. What?! Back in March, a team of astrophysicists published a paper in the journal Nature claiming to have found a galaxy lacking dark matter —...

Jul 30, 2018

Another Dark-Matter Search Fails — Shedding Light on the Universe

Once again, dark matter has failed to turn up where researchers hoped they might find it. PandaX — essentially a tank holding 1,280 lbs. (580 kilograms) of liquid xenon beneath the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, China — is one of the most sensitive dark-matter detectors on the planet. If dark...

Sep 30, 2018

Scientists Pinpoint Where Dark Matter Is Hiding in the Universe

There's a huge amount of matter in the universe that we can't directly see. But scientists can tell it's there. They call it dark matter. They know it's there because its gravity tugs on the stars and galaxies around it, altering their movement. Dark matter also tugs on light as...

Nov 26, 2018

The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

Dark Matter Web (Image credit: Shutterstock)In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark...

Dec 7, 2018

Physicists Keep Trying — and Failing — to Find Dark Matter in Dark Places

Scientists started watching crystals sparkle in the 1990s. Those crystals sparkled more in the summer, which researchers took as evidence of dark matter. But those scientists were probably wrong, new research suggests. Scientists have very good reason to believe that dark matter exists — that there's some unseen stuff tugging...

Dec 9, 2018

Will Dark Matter Mess with These Ultraprecise Atomic Clocks?

The existence of dark matter is suggested via its gravitational effects on the movements of stars and galaxies. However, it remains a mystery as to what it might be composed of, and projects ranging from the most powerful atom smasher ever built to vats of chilly liquid xenon have failed...

Jan 1, 2019

4 Dark Matter Searches to Watch in 2019

2018 was a big year for dark matter. As usual, astronomers didn't actually find any of the stuff, which is invisible to all our telescopes but appears to make up at least 80 percent of the universe by mass. There were reports of a dark matter hurricane, but we can't...

Jan 2, 2019

Scientists Find the 'Missing' Dark Matter from the Early Universe

Dark matter, it seems, has been clinging to galaxies for a very long time. Most galaxies that existed 10 billion years ago had about as much dark matter as galaxies do today, contradicting earlier studies that suggested less dark matter lurked around galaxies in the early universe. Dark matter was...

Jan 14, 2019

Dark Matter Behaves Differently in Dying Galaxies

Dark matter detectives barely know anything about dark matter, but now they know this: It behaves differently on the fringes of old galaxies than in new ones. Dark matter is the stuff we can't see in the universe. It makes up most of the mass in the universe but doesn't...