Giant simulation could help solve “dark matter” mystery

 

Yep more stuff on Dark Matter—I can’t get enough.

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A gi­ant com­put­er sim­ula­t­ion could help br­ing a suc­cess­ful end to the search for a mys­te­ri­ous sub­stance which makes up most of the Uni­verse, ac­cord­ing to new re­search.
As­tro­no­mers be­lieve the en­ig­mat­ic “dark mat­ter” ac­counts for 85 per cent of the ma­te­ri­al in the uni­verse. But the stuff has re­mained in­vis­i­ble, its make­up un­known, since sci­en­tists in­ferred its ex­ist­ence from its gravita­t­ional ef­fects more than 75 years ago.

Now a team of sci­en­tists has used a mas­sive com­put­er sim­ula­t­ion show­ing the ev­o­lu­tion of a gal­axy like the Milky Way to “see” high-en­er­gy ra­di­a­t­ion re­leased by dark mat­ter. 
They say their find­ings, pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Na­ture Nov. 6, could help NA­SA’s Fer­mi Tel­e­scope in its search for the dark mat­ter and open a new chap­ter in our un­der­stand­ing of the uni­verse.
“The search for dark mat­ter has dom­i­nat­ed cos­mol­o­gy for many dec­ades. It may soon come to an end,” said cos­molo­g­ist Car­los Frenk of Dur­ham Uni­ver­s­ity, U.K., a mem­ber of the re­search team, which al­so in­volves sci­en­tists from Ger­many, The Neth­er­lands and the Un­ited States.
The group, known as the Vir­go Con­sor­ti­um, stud­ied dark mat­ter ha­los, blob-like struc­tures that sur­round ga­lax­ies and con­tain a tril­lion times the mass of the Sun. 
The team’s sim­ula­t­ions, called The Aquar­i­us Proj­ect, showed how the gal­ax­y’s ha­lo would have been ex­pected to grow through a se­ries of vi­o­lent col­li­sions and merg­ers be­tween much smaller clumps of dark mat­ter ear­li­er in cos­mic his­to­ry.
The group found that gamma-rays, a form of en­er­get­ic radia­t­ion, pro­duced when par­t­i­cles col­lide in ar­eas of high dark mat­ter con­centra­t­ion should be most de­tect­a­ble near the Sun in the gen­er­al di­rec­tion of the gal­ax­y’s cen­tre. They sug­gest the Fer­mi Tel­e­scope should search in this part of the gal­axy where they pre­dict gamma-rays from dark mat­ter should glow in “a smoothly var­y­ing and char­ac­ter­is­tic pat­tern.”
If Fer­mi does de­tect the pre­dicted emis­sion from the Milky Way’s smooth in­ner ha­lo, the Vir­go team be­lieves it might be able to see oth­er­wise in­vis­i­ble clumps of dark mat­ter ly­ing very close to the Sun.

 

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081119_darkmatter.htm

 

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