What a tease. A high-profile dark matter-hunting experiment that sits atop the International Space Station allegedly has interesting results – but its researchers are not telling.
On 17 February, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who designed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), was due to announce the results at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. But instead he told a disappointed group of reporters and scientists that his team would wait till the work was published in a journal.
AMS launched on the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavour in May 2011, with the goal of catching whiffs of exotic matter. That includes dark matter, which supposedly makes up about 80 per cent of the universe's matter. According to leading theories, it is made of as-yet-undetected particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles.