Spaceborne dark matter hunter sees telltale antimatter
A dark matter-hunting telescope perched on the International Space Station has spotted millions of particles of antimatter. It could be the first clear evidence of dark matter particles smashing into each other – or something much more mundane.
"It's an indication, but by no means is it a proof" of dark matter, says Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the principle investigator for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment.
AMS launched on the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour in May 2011 in order to catch whiffs of the most exotic types of matter. That includes dark matter, thought to make up about 80 per cent of the matter in the universe, but which scarcely interacts with ordinary matter and so has never been conclusively detected.
