neutrino

"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad It was in the 1930s, looking at dense clusters of galaxies (like Coma, below), that Fritz Zwicky first noticed that the mass in the Universe didn't add up. Image credit: Adam Block / Mount Lemmon SkyCenter / University of Arizona. We knew how gravity worked, so it was pretty straightforward -- based on how the galaxies within…
Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter: The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early universe during the Big Bang when Dark Matter was first created. If the LHC does indeed create such particles then it will be the first time that the amount of Dark Matter in the universe has increased since the Big Bang - the LHC will effectively be a Dark Matter 'factory'. Well, Hector basically…