1st Results from Space Station Particle Detector Experiment Coming in March

Scientists are preparing to release the first round of results from a key experiment aboard the International Space Station that has been sampling a soup of high-energy particles in space.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle detector was installed on the station during the next-to-last space shuttle mission in April 2011. Since then, the $2 billion instrument, a collaboration of 60 research institutes in 16 countries, has been amassing a proverbial mountain of data, including a headcount of 7.7 billion electrons and positrons (the antimatter counterpart to electrons.)

Scientists are less interested in the overall numbers of particles than the ratio between the two. The idea is to determine if there are more antimatter particles than matter, and, if so, at exactly what energy level does the disparity occur.

The smoking gun that were looking for in the positron-to-electron ratio is a rise and then a dramatic fall. Thats the key signature that would come from the dark matter annihilating the halo, said Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

The halo Turner is referring to is the halo of the Milky Way galaxy, the region beyond the central disk of stars and dust. If current theoretical models are correct, theres a massively massive pool of dark matter perhaps as big as 1 million light years across that envelopes the visible galaxy, which is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

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1st Results from Space Station Particle Detector Experiment Coming in March