Picture yourself in a car, your hand surfing the breeze through the open window. Hold your palm perpendicular to the wind and you can feel its force. Now picture the car slowing, rolling up to a stop sign, and feel the force of the wind lessen until it—and the car—stop.
This wind isn’t due to the weather. It arises because of your motion relative to air molecules. Simple enough to understand and known to kids, dogs and road-trippers the world over.
This wind has an analogue in the rarefied world of particle astrophysics called the “dark matter wind,” and scientists are hoping it will someday become a valuable tool in their investigations into that elusive stuff that apparently makes up about 85 percent of the mass in the universe.
In the analogy above, the air molecules are dark matter particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. Our sun is the car, racing around the Milky Way at about 220 kilometers per second, with the Earth riding shotgun. Together, we move through a halo of dark matter that encompasses our galaxy. But our planet is a rowdy passenger; it moves from one side of the sun to the other in its orbit.
When you add the Earth’s velocity of 30 kilometers per second to the sun’s, as happens when both are traveling in the same direction (toward the constellation Cygnus), then the dark matter wind feels stronger. More WIMPs are moving through the planet than if it were at rest, resulting in greater number of detections by experiments. Subtract that velocity when the Earth is on the other side of its orbit, and the wind feels weaker, resulting in fewer detections.
Astrophysicists have been thinking about the dark matter wind for decades. Among the first, way back in 1986, were theorist David Spergel of Princeton University and colleagues Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan and Andrzej K. Drukier (now in private industry, but still looking for WIMPs).
To read more, click here.