Scientists may have detected the 1st direct evidence of dark matter

An illustration of a rare interaction between dark matter WIMP particles

(Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

In what could be a groundbreaking discovery, scientists report they may have detected the first direct evidence of dark matter. The potential detection came from the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, in the form of a single suspected interaction between a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), one of the leading hypothetical particle candidates for dark matter, and an everyday particle.Dark matter has been a headache for scientists because, despite accounting for 85% of the mass in the universe, scientists have no idea what it is. The fact that dark matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, or light, means that it can't be composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, the particles that make up the atoms that compose stars, planets, moons, our bodies, and everything we see around us on a day-to-day basis.This has spurred on the search for new types of particles beyond the limits of the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics. So far, this search has been frustratingly fruitless — but the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment may have finally caught a glimpse.An analysis of data from LUZ-ZEPLIN, a detector composed of 10 tons of ultrapure liquid xenon, one mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, showed a single particle interaction that scientists can't explain with known background signals from normal matter."This was a detailed study in a region we hadn't explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events," team leader Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol in the U.K. said in a statement. "We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important."What does this tell us about dark matter?If the event detected by this team was caused by the rare interaction between two WIMPs, this would tell scientists some things about these currently hypothetical particles.Firstly, the signal indicates that WIMPs have a mass around 200 times greater than the mass of a proton. It also suggests that WIMPs would interact with ordinary matter in a way that hasn't been predicted by the simplest modelling of these particles before.