The International Space Station's most anticipated science results are in, but their interpretation — which hint at a dark matter detection — is likely to be debated by physicists for years to come.
Physics Nobel prize-winner Samuel Ting presented the first data today from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $1.5 billion cosmic ray detector fixed to the outside of the station. In a talk at CERN, a particle physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Ting told physicists that the mission has confirmed data from the European satellite PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showing that something in the Galaxy is spewing out many more positrons, the antimatter counterparts of electrons, than can be accounted for from known astrophysical sources.
Yet the detailed spectrum of this antimatter excess is far from a smoking gun for models that generate the extra positrons through the annihilation of dark matter particles colliding with each other. “The detailed interpretation of our data probably will have many theories,” says Ting.
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