The world's most sensitive dark matter hunt experiment has recorded a signal it cannot explain. A signal recorded at the bottom of an old mine in South Dakota is intriguing physicists. It may just be noise. It may have an explanation no one has yet found. But it could also be what scientists have been searching for for decades: a dark matter interaction.
The detection was announced this Tuesday, at a conference in Japan, by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) international collaboration. The researchers warn that it is still too early to confirm that it is actually dark matter, and further analyses are needed to rule out other possible explanations.
The LZ experiment uses ultra-sensitive detectors filled with xenon gas to try to capture the faint signals that dark matter would leave when colliding with ordinary atoms. So far, no conventional explanation has been found for the recorded signal.
If dark matter exists, someday we will find it, and the physicists involved in this project believe they are one small step closer to that historic discovery.
