For two years, the team has been using one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors. <\/p>\n
It’s basically a big tank filled with a really dense liquid.<\/p>\n
We spoke to Professor of Astrophysics Matt Nicholl to try and help explain this a bit more. He said to picture the tank of liquid like a giant snooker table.<\/p>\n
And all the time there are particles, like snooker balls, passing from one end to the other, and usually they don’t hit each other.<\/p>\n
But every so often they do! <\/p>\n
And the heavier the snooker ball, the bigger the bump would be if it hit another one.<\/p>\n
He explained that it’s like the scientists “have found one of their snooker balls got hit by a bigger ball”.<\/p>\n
And the one they saw has roughly the same mass as gold, but usually things from space are a LOT lighter.<\/p>\n
So it seems likely that it’s a particle we don’t know about which COULD be dark matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For two years, the team has been using one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors. It’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":760645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-760644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}