30-Nov-2017: China’s DAMPE probe looks for decayed dark matter particles in space

A Chinese satellite which was sent to the skies to look for evidence of the annihilation or decay of dark matter particles in space has detected unexpected and mysterious signals in its measurement of high-energy cosmic rays, bringing scientists closer to proving the existence of the invisible matter. The mysterious dark matter is believed to comprise a quarter of universe.

The satellite, Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE), also called Wukong or “Monkey King”, has measured more than 3.5 billion cosmic ray particles with the highest energy up to 100 tera-electron-volts (TeV), including 20 million electrons and positrons, with unprecedented high energy resolution, Xinhua reported.

Precise measurement of cosmic rays, especially at the very high energy range, are important for scientists to look for traces of dark matter annihilation or decay, as well as to understand the universe’s most energetic astrophysical phenomena, such as pulsars, active galaxy nuclei and supernova explosions.

Dark matter is one of the great riddles of physics. While normal matter – making up the stars and planets and so on – is understood to account for just four percent of the mass-energy density of the universe, dark matter is believed to make up a quarter, yet its nature is unknown and yet to be detected. Its existence has been postulated through observations of the cosmos and, though elusive, it is key to the formation of the galaxies and structure of the universe.

DAMPE, short for DArk Matter Particle Explorer, was designed to look for clues to support one hypothesis for dark matter, which claims it consists of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. The idea for DAMPE was to collect the high energy cosmic ray electrons and anti-matter counterpart positrons, which are emitted by phenomena such as supernovae and pulsars.