The XENON100 experiment buried deep underground in Italy is one of a handful of efforts to directly detect dark matter, a substance thought to be plentiful in the universe, despite the fact that our telescopes can't see it. Astronomers can detect dark matter's gravitational effects on normal matter, but have not yet confirmed a direct measurement of the sought-after substance.
While a few teams have reported potential sightings of the strange stuff, the new results from XENON100 — which its scientists say is the most sensitive search to date — suggests those possible signals were not dark matter. If they were, XENON100 should have detected dozens of events unless the properties of dark matter are very different than expected.
"Dark matter particles continue to escape our instruments, yet we are getting much more clever in our search and feel confident that we will soon unveil them," said Elena Aprile, spokesperson of the XENON100 experiment and a professor of physics at Columbia University.
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