Physicists last week1 announced evidence that particles of dark matter — the invisible, hypothetical material believed to make up more than 80% of the mass of the Universe — may have a lower mass than suspected. The results, posted on the arXiv preprint server, match findings from some experiments but contradict others.
The researchers, including Godehard Angholer at the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich, Germany, focused on candidate dark-matter particles called WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles. The team analysed data from the CRESST II experiment housed at the Gran Sasso? National Laboratory deep beneath the Italian Apennine Mountains. Of the 67 WIMP-like signals the researchers identified, 27 could not be discounted as background events, they say. And if those signals do turn out to be WIMPs, then the particles would have a mass of roughly 10 billion to 50 billion electronvolts (9–53 times the mass of a proton).
The jury is still out. To read the rest of the article, click here."These stats are weak. In any case my theory that dark matter is from virtual fermion-antifermion pairs inside the vacuum would be disproved (Popper falsified) if these stats get better." - Jack Sarfatti