Existing comment:
DARK PHOTONS
There is a dark side to the universe. "Dark energy" is a mysterious property of space blowing the universe up. "Dark matter" is probably made of still unknown particles of matter, not the matter we know as protons, neutrons, and electrons which make stars and planets, gas and dust. There is something else. Astronomers discovered dark matter because it has a gravitational field that keeps galaxies and clusters of galaxies together. It has also been found to bend light from very distant galaxies. Small black holes would do that but may not be enough. Physicists believe dark matter is probably made of fundamental particles that we have not yet discovered, having no electric charge and interacting extremely weakly with normal matter. Like neutrinos, but not neutrinos.
An intriguing possibility is that there are particles that interact very weakly with both normal matter and dark matter, called "portals" since they act like doorways through which we, made of normal matter, can connect to the dark side. They could be produced in particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and could penetrate many meters of iron absorber and then decay to known particles. One possibility is called a "dark photon," which is like the massless photon, the particle of light, but this would have some mass and interact much less with atoms. Several experiments are underway to see if such heavy partners of photons exist. Heavy neutrinos are another possibility - or is there another Higgs boson waiting to be found? There may be a whole "parallel world" of forms of matter that we may be able to discover - or at least glimpse - through such portals. |