Let us look to the heavens in imitation of the ancients. And in doing so, let us try to understand almost incomprehensible things like dark matter. Perhaps that will alleviate the dismay that cosmology is simpler than politics.
Let us make our curiosity fly like a kite by thinking about light and strange particles. And let’s round off our children’s play by imagining giant planets that want to catch them. That is precisely what one of the latest challenges in astrophysics is about: it aims to discover in depth the nature of dark matter as something made up of hypothetical particles proposed by scientists. And for this, it turns to Jupiter, one of our heavy neighbors. And when I say heavy, it’s not that it’s boring, but that it’s very massive. It’s not by chance that we call it the Red Giant.
Jupiter’s power to trap WIMP
This fundamentally gaseous planet has a low density, and its surface gravity is only a little more than twice that of Earth. However, the gravitational field in the interior looks like it could be very strong, as suggested by complex measurements from the Juno mission. This would be due to the presence of metallic elements trapped at very high pressures in the planet’s core.
This gravitational power gives Jupiter the ability to trap light particles that could theoretically make up dark matter, the so-called WIMPs. Of course, ‘light’ here means a particle with the same energy as a proton or a neutron, i.e. on the order of a gigaelectronvolt.
As the electro-goblins knew, that would be precisely the energy needed to make an electron move through a potential difference of a billion volts. This similarity in energy scales should come as no surprise. There are hypotheses suggesting that dark matter particles could be mirror neutrons.
But we don’t just need to understand what dark matter is. It is just as important, if not more important, to detect it.
Wandering dark matter
There could be dark matter particles wandering around the universe that wander into cozy Jupiter. In that treacherous shelter, they would suffer various collisions with all the other particles (identical or those of the planet itself). It would be as if the dark matter were playing a planetary billiards tournament. In each of these collisions, the dark matter particles would lose energy and finally be annihilated according to the rules of quantum mechanics, which is celebrating its anniversary this year.
The fruitful result of the destruction of WIMPs would be the emission of neutrinos that could be detected on Earth.
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