Did We Catch Dark Energy While Hunting Dark Matter?
Imagine the following scenario: You put in a lot of effort into building an underground detector for dark matter. After all that work, you find no dark matter. But, you get surprising data that could be the first true evidence towards dark energy.
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It’s ironic. But typical for the futile fishing for evidence of dark matter. The experiment XENON1T that can be found in the underground of Italy was designed to detect dark matter particles. And honestly, nobody was really surprised that it didn’t found any dark matter. But scientists from the University of Cambridge found some unexpected results and come with an extravagant explanation. Well, unless it's an error in measurement or technical issues.
The scientists think that the strange data isn’t caused by dark matter but by dark energy. That’s like finding a banshee where you expected to find a vampire. Sunny Vagnozzi and his colleagues created a model that was supposed to explain the unusual results of the XENON1T experiment. That came to the conclusion that the cause are “dark energy particles” that are being created in the powerful magnetic fields near the Sun. And just the fact of talking about particles in connection to dark energy is quite strange.
The scientists themselves say that their results will need to be seriously verified with a plethora of other experiments. XENON1T was designed to directly detect dark matter as it was presumed maybe its particles could somehow collide with regular matter. There was likely no one who expected to help with dark energy. Dark energy is even more mysterious than dark matter. If either of them even exists. Usually, scientists search for dark energy through gravitational interactions because the reason why we think dark energy exists is that we observe the Universe’s expansion accelerating.
At first, the strange data from XENON1T was first thought to be a result of axions. These are extremely light particles counted among some of the promising candidates for dark matter. But over time it was proven that axions don’t fit star evolution models. When it comes to dark energy, most models that try to incorporate it predicts the existence of a “fifth force” that would expand the list of fundamental forces. But, Einstein’s general relativity works very well. So, a new fundamental force isn’t what we are looking for. That’s why many dark energy models use “screening mechanisms” that hide the fifth force from interacting with the world as we know it.
Vagnozzi’s team used a model with so-called chameleon screening. This model assumes that chameleon screening prevents the production of dark energy particles in very dense objects avoiding the problems axion models have. On top of that, it also nicely separates what happens in the relatively dense Universe we live in from what’s happening in space at truly large scales. Because over large scales the density of the Universe is truly minuscule.
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