Superconductive Magnets Scaned The Earths Core In Search For Dark Matter
If dark matter exists in macroscopic objects they could do weird stuff inside of objects made from common matter. Like inside of stars or planets. Extremely precise gravimeters searched for them by looking for tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational field.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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Hellish Dark Matter
The Universe should be full of dark matter. But this substance is still evading discovery even though scientists are searching really hard. The situation is so bad that scientists are searching for dark matter almost anywhere even the least probable places.
Charles Horowitz and Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig from Indiana University in the United States and the Black Forest Observatory (BFO) in Germany decided to look for dark matter right under our feet. Our ancestors might even say they are searching for it in Hell. This is because they are searching in the core of our planet which honestly isn't that different from how our ancestors imagined Hell.
If You Can't Find It In Space Search Inside The Earth
The scientists are searching for so-called compact dark objects (CDO). If such objects exist they should be easier to find compared to the other spectral dark matter particles. These compact dark objects should interact with surrounding regular matter not only through gravity but the non-gravitational interactions would be extremely weak.
Horowitz and Widmer-Schnidrig searched for dark matter objects inside the Sun and in neutron stars in their previous research. Now they decided to focus on the Earth. They are basing their research on the fact that dark matter – with the exception of gravity – only negligibly interacts with surrounding regular matter. That means that compact dark objects could exist even inside of massive objects made from regular matter in a way that would be impossible for regular matter. To find them they are using devices capable of detecting a difference in the gravitational forces in different places of the Earth's core.
The devices they use are called gravimeters. These ultra-precise devices detect changes in the gravitational acceleration. A superconductive gravimeter can measure it to twelve decimal points accurately. And if the compact dark objects exist in the Earth's core their gravitational effects should change as they get closer or farther from the gravimeters. The researchers calculated that if such objects exist they should orbit inside the inner core with a period of roughly 55 minutes. That is why they searched for gravitational signals that would fit that behavior.
Sadly, in the end, the superconductive gravimeters did not find any. Thus, there likely aren't any in the Earth's core. Well, unless such objects inside the core have a very low mass or a very tiny orbit around the Earth's core. Nonetheless, the scientists aren't giving up and want to repeat their experiments with even more precise gravimeters. But so far it looks that even in Hell there is no dark matter.
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