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Scientists' Biggest Search For Dark Matter To Date Just Turned Up Nothing (sciencealert.com)
Peter Dockrill, reporting for ScienceAlert: For something that's hypothesised to make up more than 80 percent of the mass of the entire universe, it's no easy thing to detect the existence of dark matter. That's the conclusion the world is coming to today, after scientists announced that a massive $10 million experiment to find traces of elusive dark matter particles had failed after an exhaustive 20-month search. "We've probed previously unexplored regions of parameter space with the aim of making the first definitive discovery of dark matter," said physicist Cham Ghag from University College London in the UK, one of the scientists who took part in the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) project based in South Dakota. "Though a positive signal would have been welcome, nature was not so kind! Nonetheless, a null result is significant as it changes the landscape of the field by constraining models for what dark matter could be beyond anything that existed previously."Ars Technica has more details.
results didn't rule out WIMPS, only certain kinds of WIMPS. A new detector the LUX-ZEPLIN will be 100 times as sensitive and continue the search
>the dark matter explanation feels a bit hacky anyway.
Dark matter isn't the explanation, it's the question.
We observe things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
but we don't know what is causing them. "Dark matter" is just a short way of saying "whatever it is that is responsible for these things we are observing".
Right, a theory. But if you can't count it, can't measure it, does it really exist?
But we can measure it. Its gravity reveals its existence, its quantity, and its location. So yes it exists. We just don't know what it is, and the detector experiments are testing theories about what it may be.
We also have pretty good estimates of the density of dark matter in the solar neighborhood. It amounts to 0.49 ± 0.13 GeV cm3. This means, if you weight 70 kg, your body contains about 34 trillion electron-volts of dark matter (or 6*10^-20 grams).
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
They do not entertain the idea that maybe their laws are wrong, or that some other phenomenon might be affecting gravity.
Sure, MOND never happened.