Our Planet May Be Sprouting Super-Dense “Hairs” of Dark Matter
Calculations
made by a JPL-California research scientist suggest that thin strands
of dark matter filaments are spreading out from large planetary bodies
like Earth and Jupiter. If true, it’s a possible sign that we may be
able to finally detect these hypothetical forms of matter.
“As the
evidence of dark matter’s existence has become overwhelming,
understanding its nature and interactions through the observation of
both direct...and indirect...dark matter detection has become an
increasingly vigorous field of inquiry,” writes Gary Prézeau in his new
study, which can be found at the arXiv pre-print server.
Indeed,
detecting dark matter has proven to be much easier said than done. This
elusive form of matter, though it may account for nearly 85% of all the
stuff in the Universe, has never been detected directly. It doesn’t emit
or absorb light, or any other electromagnetic radiation. It’s
hypothesized that dark matter only interacts with our visible universe
through gravity. Thus, it’s predicted to manifest as halos, discs, and
streams.
To learn
more about dark matter—particularly as it applies to its presence around
compact bodies like planets—Prézeau performed a series of simulations. New Scientist explains:
[Prézeau] wondered what would happen if a stream of dark matter pierced a planet like Earth. He calculated that the planet’s gravity would bend the particles’ trajectories and focus them to a point. This “lensing” effect would concentrate dark matter along an axis passing through Earth’s core, reaching densities about a billion times more than average at the focal point.
Which is
awesome news if he’s right; given that the “root” of the dark matter
hair—its singular focal point—is predicted to extend about a million
kilometers above Earth (which is beyond the Moon), we could set up a
space-based detector in the vicinity to search for it. What’s more,
because there are millions of streams flowing through our solar system,
we could also perform searches around larger bodies such as Jupiter and
Saturn.
“The
discovery of a hair would...be a huge boon for both planetary science
and cosmology,” writes Prézeau in his study. He offers three specific
benefits:
- A hair would provide a uniquely powerful laboratory to study dark matter interactions.
- Hairs are unique windows into the fine structure of the local dark matter streams.
- A hair discovered near Earth (or Jupiter) would find counterparts in all solar system bodies providing a powerful universal tool to probe the interior of almost any planet or moon.
Prézeau
says that locating these hairs “is likely to be challenging,” but may be
facilitated by the fact that the extreme densities of these hairs are
distinguishable from their velocity.
Read the entire study at the preprint arXiv: “Dense Dark Matter Hairs Spreading Out from Earth, Jupiter and Other Compact Bodies”.
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