The cosmic ray signature of dark matter?

Detecting supersymmtric dark matter

Detecting supersymmtric dark matter

A very interesting paper was published in last week’s issue of Nature – I blogged about it before after reading the NASA press release. It’s wasn’t all that helpful without reading the actual paper but the cosmic ray – dark matetr link caught my attention.

Just today a conference paper (i.e. not peer-reviewed) appeared on astro-ph about some preliminary results from PAMELA – another cosmic ray detector that focuses on antiparticles (positrons and antiprotons). Recall that PAMELA was the source of some controversy earlier this year. Another paper on PAMELA data was posted on astro-ph back in October, it’s listed as being submitted to Nature so again, not reviewed yet. But perhaps another cosmic rays Nature paper soon, and there’s certainly a lot of buzz!

I had a read through these papers and some background stuff – it’s something I didn’t know much about and it’s very cool. Cosmic rays: inneresting akshually!

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A Cosmic Challenge

Galaxies Magnified by Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689's "Gravitational Lens"

Galaxies Magnified by Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689

Cosmology, the study of the Universe on the very largest of scales, is a frustrating business. The vast majority of the matter in the Universe is unaccounted for, and of a large fraction, which we call Dark Energy, we have no idea what it even might look like, let alone how to find it. One important source of information comes from the study of gravitational lenses. When light from the most distant sources travels across the Universe, it is distorted by intervening matter, as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. By studying the distortions seen in these distant objects, cosmologists gather information about the properties of the large-scale matter distribution along the line of sight.

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