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Two of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors, CMS and ATLAS, have seen excess photon pairs that hint at the existence of a previously unknown boson with a mass of about 1500 GeV [gigaelectronvolt], which is about 12 times larger than the mass of the Higgs boson. The excess photons turned up while searching through data looking for gravitons. By themselves the data are not very significant and would not have garnered much interest, but this becomes more interesting since both experiments saw these statistical bumps in the same place. The next round of data taking in March will be able to determine whether this particle really exists.
In addition to what they might have found, also of interest is what they haven't found:
Meanwhile, searches for particles predicted by supersymmetry, physicists' favourite extension of the standard model, continue to come up empty-handed. To theoretical physicist Michael Peskin of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, the most relevant part of the talks concerned the failure to find a supersymmetric particle called the gluino in the range of possible masses up to 1,600 GeV (much farther than the 1,300-GeV limit of Run 1). This pushes supersymmetry closer to the point where many physicists might give up on it, Peskin says.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:31PM
Actually, aether theory was a very different beast - as I recall it was born of the assumption that EM waves must be waves *in* something. It didn't actually explain anything, it just filled a gap we assumed existed. Contrast that with Dark Matter and Energy, which offer explanations for several observations which shouldn't be possible according to the rest of physics:
Dark Matter originally sought to explain the fact that the outer parts of galaxies spin *much* faster than the theory of gravity says they should - so either our theory of gravity is flawed at large distances, or the majority of the galaxy's mass is actually matter beyond the edge of the visible disc, which neither emits light, nor blocks light from more distant objects. It then gained more recent support as we found evidence of gravitational lensing around galaxies suggesting that there's far more mass present than is visible, as well as anomalies such as the bullet cluster where the gravitational lens has become disconnected from the visible mass. It is possible that it's actually our theory of gravity that's flawed - but you need some good counter-evidence to undermine a time-tested theory, and so far none of the competing gravitational theories have managed to accumulate any evidence to support them.
Dark Energy is even newer, and primarily seeks to explain the fact that the universe is not only expanding, but that distant galaxies appear to be accelerating away from each other an an ever-increasing pace. That requires some phenominal ongoing force to not only neutralize gravitational attraction, but actually reverse it. And phenominal forces over long distances and billions of years equals truly mind-boggling amounts of energy for which we see no other evidence. A.k.a. "Dark" Energy.
So basically we've got two really weird gaping holes in our scientific cosmology, holes over which we've slapped crude patches to say "this is what we expect the answer to look like, assuming all our other well-tested theories are correct" We've even clearly labeled our kludges as such, calling them "Dark", or unknown. Once we have an actual well-tested theory to explain one or both of those phenomena you can bet it'll get a less mysterious name.