An international team of researchers working on the COSINE-100 experiment in South Korea has been unable to reproduce the signals reported by the researchers working on the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy despite using similar technology. Their paper was published in the journal Science Advances.
Over the past several decades, physicists around the world have been trying to find physical evidence of dark matter—the theoretical stuff that they believe makes up approximately 85% of all matter in the universe. Researchers have found indirect evidence of its existence through astrophysical observations such as gravitational lensing. But to date, little to no direct physical evidence of its existence has been found, though one team of researchers in Italy would disagree. That group is working on the DAMA/LIBRA experiment, and they claimed in 2018 that they had found physical evidence of dark matter in the form of flashes of light in sodium iodide crystals. The researchers believed the flashes are evidence of dark matter colliding with atoms in the crystals. They found that these flashes of light increase in number every June and lessen every December, and they suggest that this is due to the way Earth moves through dark matter in the Milky Way—sometimes moving faster and sometimes slower.
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