[LINK] "Scientists home in on mysterious dark matter"

[rfmcdonald]

Robert Evans' Reuters article reports on the exciting news that the first traces of dark matter may have been found.

Members of an international team had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station, said the head of the Europe- and U.S.-based research project Samuel Ting.

He told a packed seminar at the CERN research center, near Geneva, the team had found a surge of positron particles that might have come from dark matter.

In the coming months, he said, the CERN-built AMS particle detector on the space station "will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or if they have some other origin".

Dark matter, once the stuff of science fiction, "is one of the most important mysteries of physics today," Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 1976 Nobel physics prize winner, has written.

Sometimes called the sculptor of the universe's millions of galaxies because of the way its gravity shapes their formation, its existence has long been recognized because of the way it pushes visible stars and planets around.

But efforts in laboratories on earth and in deep underground caverns to find concrete evidence that it is there, and to establish what it is, have so far proven fruitless.

Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.

But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible "to get a first hold on dark matter really soon".

"That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world," said Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on ATLAS, one of the two CERN teams that believe they found evidence of the elusive Higgs particle in the centre's Large Hadron Collider.