Under the black hills in North Dakota Sanford underground research scientists use a detector called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) in the hunt for particle dark matter, a mysterious substance that, according to scientists, accounts for most of the matter in the Universe. Inside this massive device, which contains one third ton of liquid xenon in a titanium vessel, an array of sensitive Svetozarov waiting for the moment when the dark matter particle will collide with a xenon atom and emit a tiny flash of light.
Hoping to catch a weak signal, LUX placed under a kilometer layer of rock that should help in the protection from cosmic rays and other radiation, which could interfere with the signal.
While LUX has not detected dark matter. But with a new set of calibration techniques that improve the sensitivity of detectors, scientists hope to soon finally find dark matter. “It is important that we continue to develop the potential of our detector,” says Professor brown University Rick Gaitskell.
Dark beginning
If scientists finally discover particles of dark matter, it will be the culmination of a search that began in 1930-ies. That’s when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined that the speed with which the rotating remote galaxies, the cluster indicated that the cluster had more mass than could be seen in the observed light.
Since then, scientists looking for dark matter and trying to figure out what it is. In recent years, scientists have relied on tools from the European Large hadron Collider to the orbital x-ray Observatory Chandra NASA.
If we assume that eventually scientists will reach the nature of dark matter, another question arises: is there any human way to use it? Will it help your research to understand the Universe or we will be able to develop applications?
Practical application
One possibility, which in 2009 spoke a physicist at new York University Jia Liu, might be to use dark matter as an energy source for powering spacecraft during long missions.
The concept is based on Liu have not yet tested the assumption that dark matter consists of neutralino, a particle without electrical charge. Neutralino can also be antiparticles, that is, when faced with certain conditions, will annihilate each other and convert all their mass into energy.
If this proves true, a pound of dark matter can produce 5 billion times more energy than an equivalent amount of dynamite. Yes, that’s billion. Reactor dark matter can easily break up a rocket in space, and a large enough kernel can overclock the device to nearly the speed of light, as the work of Liu.
Reach out to the stars
The engine for dark matter Liu will differ from a traditional rocket. It will be a box with a door that opens in the direction of the rocket to collect dark matter. When dark matter enters the box, the door closes, and the box is compressed to compress the dark matter and increase the rate of annihilation. As soon as the particles turn into energy, the door opens again, and the energy pushes the rocket. During space travel, this cycle continues.
One of the advantages of the engine on the dark matter would be that space the device will not need to carry a lot of fuel because it will be able to get him on the road, given the abundance of dark matter in our Universe. And the faster the rocket moves, the faster it will collect dark matter to speed up.
100-ton rocket ship can theoretically approach the speed of light in a few days. This, in turn, will reduce the time needed to travel to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar system, with tens of thousands of years to perhaps five.
In addition, there will be other technologies and inventions that we don’t know and won’t know until we realize they are a possibility.