- 3292 - DARK ENERGY - could we have found some? The theory for what is accelerating the expansion of the universe is called “dark energy” It has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter that we can see. The stuff that is not “dark”.
--------------------- 3292 - DARK ENERGY - could we have found some?
- Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects and the shape of space itself is a major goal for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
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- But a group of cosmologists suggest that it might not need to peer deep into the universe to make second-hand observations of dark energy. It may have been detected right here on Earth.
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- Researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the “Gran Sasso National Laboratory” in Italy during an experiment designed to detect “dark matter“.
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- “XENON1T” is an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.
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- There may be other explanations for this signal. It may be just a statistical anomaly in the data? Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain. There was only one chance in about 3.5 million that the detection was anomalous.
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- The detection of dark energy in XENON1T would mean the first experimental verification of what is arguably the most powerful force shaping the evolution and fate of the entire universe.
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- Dark energy repels instead of attracts and it’s what is expanding the universe at an ever accelerating rate. Physicists have known the universe is expanding for years, but in the late 1990s, observations made it clear that the universe was not just growing larger but doing so at an accelerating rate.
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- That was a very strange thing to discover. Since normal gravity is attractive, we would expect all the galaxies to be pulling on each other and slowing down the expansion of the universe.
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- All the known matter we know and understand (?)should be pulling in on the universe, not pushing outward. Astrophysicists dreamed up this new stuff to explain this strange behavior. Filling all of space, dark energy’s negative pressure is inflating the universe like blowing up a balloon. It is just a theory.
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- Dark energy is believed to be about 68 percent of the mass of the universe, and that ratio grows with the expansion of the universe. Dark energy seems to interact very little with gravity which should be slowing down the expansion of the universe.
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- 27 percent of the mass is “dark matter“, which is unrelated to dark energy. Dark matter may be objects we can’t easily detect or matter made out of exotic particles. Normal matter consisting of the remaining 5 percent. Both dark matter and normal matter interact with gravity.
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- In June, 2020, a XENON team reported their experiment had recorded an excessive number of particle interactions with electrons in the detector compared with their predictions. Proposed explanations for the extra detections range from statistical anomalies to the detection of “solar axions“, a hypothetical type of dark matter particle that could be produced in the core of the Sun. This theory, however, contradicted observations of both the Sun and other stars.
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- XENON1T may have incidentally detected dark energy “chameleon” particles, a hypothetical form of dark energy that could be created in the Sun and, under the conditions of the XENON1T experiment, interact with normal matter in much the same way as “solar axions“, but without contradicting observations of other stars.
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- “Chameleon theories” are just one of many frameworks for understanding dark energy.
If dark energy is driven by a new light degree of freedom coupled to matter and photons then dark energy quanta are predicted to be produced in the Sun.
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- These quanta free-stream toward Earth where they can interact with Standard Model particles in the detection chambers of direct detection experiments, presenting the possibility that these experiments could be used to test dark energy.
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- The XENON1T may have achieved the first direct detection of dark energy. This study plans for confirming this scenario using future detectors such as XENONnT, PandaX-4T, and LUX-ZEPLIN.
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- There is much more to learn. Stay tuned.
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- October 4, 2021 DARK ENERGY - could we have found some? 3292
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