In recent years, physicists have become interested in the idea of ultralight dark matter, which posits that dark matter is composed of extremely low-mass bosons. One such candidate is the “dark photon,” which is predicted to interact weakly with matter by coupling to regular photons—a process called kinetic mixing. Now Haipeng An at Tsinghua University in China and colleagues propose that it may be possible to detect dark photons via their interactions with free electrons in radio telescopes. Using data from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, An and colleagues set an upper limit for the probability of such interactions [1].
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