Dark Matter, WIMPS, and NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Data

cylonlover writes "Recently the media has been saturated with overly-hyped reports that NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer may have detected dark matter. These claims may have some justification if the word 'may' is shouted, but they rest on a number of really major assumptions and guesses, some of which are on weak and shifting soil. So just what was seen in the experiment, and what are the possible explanations?"

Comments

Re:Blog Spam

[Black Parrot]

Usually we don't discuss these things until they appear on the Bad Astronomy blog.

Improperly worded summary

[AchilleTalon]

From the summary: "... reports that NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer ..."

AMS isn't a NASA experiment, it is an international collaboration and NASA is only one among many other collaborators. Source: http://www.ams02.org/partners/participating-institutions/

I believe this summary is badly worded letting people think the AMS experiment is even a NASA initiative while it isn't neither. It is a CERN experiment that is taking advantage of the ISS and hence the NASA collaboration. Even other space agencies have contributed in this experiment.