Reports in The Guardian and Scientific American about the possible detection of dark matter, via observations of X-Rays from the Sun.
Researchers at Leicester University spotted the curious signal in 15 years of measurements taken by the European Space Agency’s orbiting XMM-Newton observatory. They noticed that the intensity of x-rays recorded by the spacecraft rose by about 10% whenever it observed the boundary of Earth’s magnetic field that faces towards the sun.
(The XMM Newton is an X-Ray Observatory in earth orbit, summarised at Wikipedia)
With no explanation in traditional physics, the scientists looked to more outlandish theories. One seemed to fit the bill. It called for theoretical particles of dark matter called axions streaming from the core of the sun and producing x-rays when they slammed into Earth’s magnetic field.
“If the model is right then it could well be axions that we are seeing and they could explain a component of the dark matter that everyone thinks exists,” Read told the Guardian.
Obviously this is fairly speculative at this point
“We found an unusual result that we can't explain by any conventional method, and this axion theory does explain it,” says co-author Andy Read, an astronomer at Leicester. “But it is just a hypothesis, and most hypotheses don't make it,” he adds.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19 2014, @07:53AM
Earth was made of dark matter all along.
(Score: 3, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Sunday October 19 2014, @08:06AM
Nice to see the summary didn't call it a theory, when in fact it is only a hypothesis. BTW: The quote is apparently via Scientificamerica [scientificamerican.com], not the guradian.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday October 19 2014, @11:37AM
And not even a new hypothesis [wordpress.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 19 2014, @08:28AM
I'm sure the majority of the readers here have no idea what an axion is (nor had I), so linking to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] would have been a good idea.
What's nice about axions is that they were not postulated because of dark matter, but to solve a problem of quantum chromodynamics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday October 19 2014, @11:31AM
Oh, ta, got me scared [wordpress.com]... for a moment.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford