Yeah, no. I was verbally attacked yesterday just trying to do my job while white. I have NEVER had an issue with anyone, around race. The absolute rage towards me, for no reason, just thought they could take advantage of the current CLIMATE to abuse another human, and be "Justified" simply due to a color difference.
An underground dark-matter experiment may have stumbled on the 'holy grail': a new particle that could upend the laws of physics
An underground vat of liquid xenon in Italy may have just detected a new particle, born in the heart of the sun.
If that's indeed what happened, it could upend laws of physics that have held fast for roughly 50 years.
Researchers created the underground vat to search for dark matter, the elusive stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe. Scientists know dark matter exists because they can measure the way its gravity affects faraway galaxies, but they've never detected it directly before.
That's why an international group of researchers built the experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. The vat is filled with 3.2 metric tons of liquid xenon, and those atoms interact with tiny particles when they collide. Each interaction, or "event," produces a flash of light and sheds electrons.
In theory, this experiment is sensitive enough to detect interactions with particles of dark matter.
The Xenon Experiment
In the latest version of the experiment, researchers expected the machine to detect 232 events within a year, based on known particles. But instead, it detected 285 events — 53 more than predicted.
What's more, the amount of energy released in those extra events corresponded with the predicted energies of a yet-undiscovered particle called the solar axion: a type of particle that physicists have hypothesized exists but never observed.
"The hypothetical particle that could potentially explain the XENON data is one that is much too heavy to be dark matter, but could be created by the sun," Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who is not affiliated with XENON, told Business Insider. "If that were true, it would be hugely important — it would be a Nobel Prize-winning finding."
It's also possible, however, that the interactions were anomalies, which pop up all the time in highly sensitive physics experiments like XENON.
Particle physicists study the smallest, most fundamental components of the universe: elementary particles like quarks and gluons, along with forces like gravity and electromagnetism.
"Particle physics is an important part of modern physics, but it's also been stuck for a long while," Carroll said. "The last truly surprising discovery in particle physics was in the 1970s."
That's when what's known as the Standard Model was established — a set of all the rules known to particle physics, which describe all the particles scientists have detected and how they interact with one another.
"With it we can essentially explain every single thing we see in a particle-physics laboratory," Aaron Manalaysay, a dark-matter physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who is unaffiliated with XENON, told Business Insider. "It's probably the most accurate scientific model in history. But we also have good reason to think that it's not the most fundamental model of nature that exists."
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/underground-dark-matter-experiment-may-233000395.html