Make it. Shake it. Break it. That’s the three-part refrain of dark-matter detectives, including Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
We don’t know what kinds of particles are responsible for dark matter, the missing mass that outweighs the universe’s normal matter by a factor of five. We don’t know how big they are or how they behave. But there are three possible paths to finding out: We can hope to make them in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We can try to sense them as they collide with and shake Standard Model particles in sensitive direct-detection experiments. Or — the method Slatyer focuses on — we could check them as they wreck themselves, watching through telescopes as they crash together or decay out in space, producing a faint, luminous signal.
So far, researchers have drawn a blank. The LHC has failed to make new particles beyond the Higgs boson. Direct-detection experiments also haven’t picked up a conclusive signal. And astronomical searches for dark matter haven’t returned any hard evidence of its identity. Yet many scientists, including Slatyer, argue that the sheer number of telescopes observing the cosmos makes it more feasible for astrophysicists to do broad searches for many different types of dark-matter particles. “Because we do astrophysics, we already have these telescopes that cover a huge range of energies,” Slatyer said.
Slatyer’s career thus far demonstrates how the new era of open-source astrophysics data allows early-career researchers who wouldn’t ordinarily be able to secure observing time on a big telescope to make important discoveries. In 2009, NASA’s gamma-ray-sensitive Fermi telescope released its data to the public. Shortly thereafter, observers including Slatyer pointed out two locations where extra gamma rays were being produced: one at the very core of the Milky Way, and another just around it.
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