The Klan Is Not Going To Be Happy About This

[Brian37]

"Come to the Dark Matter side, we have .... whatever this shit is..."

"Lonestar, I am your father's brother's cousin's former roommate."

Lonestar, "What does that make us?"

"Absolutely nothing!"

[Minimalist]

I dont get it.

The Raw Story Article does provide a sourced link early on under blue "here", and that takes you to a college research article. But what am I missing? The Raw Story article talks about proof of dark matter, but the college article talks about the behavior of hydrogen atoms and going back to the 180,000,000 years after the big bang. What do the behaviors of hydrogen atoms have to do with "dark matter"?

There are two links at the end to articles published in Nature.  But they are abstracts and a subscription to the journal is expensive.

[polymath257]

OK, I read a followup article on this phenomenon:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.10577.pdf

The mechanism of action here isn't what I thought it was from the popular articles.

What we are detecting is the time when the first stars form, 'Cosmic Dawn'. Just before this, the hydrogen is a bit cooler than the background radiation, but after it is much hotter because it is heated up by the new stars. We are focusing on that prior temperature, just before the stars actually light up.

What is found is that the temperature of that hydrogen is much lower than the predicitons made from pure astrophysics. Given the usual scenario, this low temeprature is hard to explain. BUT, it is expected that dark matter, because of its unique properties, has a much lower temperature than ordinary matter (the same happens for neutrinos, by the way), in part because dark matter doesn't interact strongly with ordinary matter, so it is not heated up by that matter.

The potential explanation for the cool matter, however, is that there is *some* interaction between the dark matter and the ordinary matter. And that interaction cools the ordinary matter (and probably heats the dark matter). Papers are now coming out trying to constrain those interactions, and there is already an estimate for the mass of any dark matter particle.

Several things are surprising and really cool (j/k) here. One is that if dark matter and ordinary matter interact in this way, this opens up more possibilities for detecting dark matter, and potentially making in our labs to study closer. The second surprise is the low mass of the dark matter particles implied by this study. Previous estimates of dark matter mass were much larger. This could have major impact on the search for dark matter particles, making it much easier in some senses.

Now, these measurements need to be verified still and the theoretical possibilities examined carefully. This is still *very* early in the process and it is quite possible this signal will go away or have a more ordinary explanation. Nonetheless, this is very exciting.

And, we have several experiments that were already being built that will be relevant to chekcing these results. So it should not be long before we know much more.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

See? Quite simple when you think about it.

[Nay_Sayer]

I appreciate everyone here's combined humor in thinking the KKK, a group of likely illiterate and possibly inbred individuals who together would on their best day, combined, eek out a double-digit IQ would read any articles regarding science and then understand the content enough to be upset about it.

Now if this was a FOX visual piece about how liberals want to ban starch and thus bring upon an era of floppy saggy Klan hoods, I could see that getting them worked up.

[haig]

Very cool, thanks for the post. I love to see Science at work continuing to dig into the evidence for the universe and our ultimate existence.

I would like to believe that each time something like this is released into the Science world, somewhere a religious person catches on to the inferences and finally realizes that religion is a man made thing. I know this is somewhat naive, but oh well.