Dark Matter Collides With Human Tissue An Average of Once a Minute, Study Finds

[EmperorScorpious]

[QUOTE]A dark matter particle smacks into an average person’s body about once a minute, and careens off oxygen and hydrogen nuclei in your cells, according to theoretical physicists. Dark matter is streaming through you as you read this, most of it unimpeded.

Dark matter is arguably the greatest mystery in modern physics. Observations from multiple sources across a few decades now shows that most of the universe is made of matter we can’t see — hence the name — but no one has been able to find it. One strong candidate for this dark material is called a WIMP, for weakly interacting massive particle, and there are a variety of observatories in Europe and the U.S. that are looking for these things. Some have found promising hints, but others have seen a whole lot of nothing.

Still, cosmologists generally agree there’s a halo of dark matter particles out there, and our solar system and our planet are flying through it. In a new paper, Katherine Freese at the University of Michigan and Christopher Savage at Stockholm University in Sweden thought about what this means for our bodies.

We know dark matter does not interact normally with regular matter — otherwise we’d be able to see it — so that means most of the particles pass through us. But some might interact with a hydrogen or oxygen nucleus, changing their energies or spins. The researchers use a 70-kg human (about 155 pounds) as an example, and calculate how many particles may be careening around based on signals from the DAMA, CoGeNT and CRESST experiments. Of the billions of high-energy WIMPs passing through a body every second, fewer than 10 hit a body’s nuclei in a given year. But lower energy WIMPs make impact much more frequently, around 100,000 collisions per person per year. That’s about one per minute.

What does this mean? Maybe nothing, in terms of impacts on human health — cosmic and solar radiation also rains down on us all the time, and it has many more detrimental effects. But it’s interesting to think that we ourselves could be dark matter detectors. The paper is posted on the astrophysics arXiv preprint server.[/QUOTE]

Sauce: [url]http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/dark-matter-collides-human-tissue-average-once-minute-study-finds[/url]

:tinfoil:

[Madman_Andre]

[img]http://facepunch.com/fp/emoot/tinfoil.gif[/img]

[Conely]

but I thought it made you turn black and spray confetti out of your body

you lied to me Half-Life

[Hysteric]

[B]COME AT ME, DARK MATTER[/B]

[ironman17]

Dark matter just gets weirder and weirder the more we know about it. Personally i'm more interested in the recently-theorised "dark photon", which sounds a lot like dark energy.

[SeamanStains]

Leave my atoms alone.

[Hiccuper]

[QUOTE=Cone;35526623]but I thought it made you turn black and spray confetti out of your body

you lied to me Half-Life[/QUOTE]

That's dark energy I thought?

[Marik Bentusi]

[QUOTE=ironman17;35526636]Dark matter just gets weirder and weirder the more we know about it. Personally i'm more interested in the recently-theorised "dark photon", which sounds a lot like dark energy.[/QUOTE]

I'm listening.

(I thought dark matter and energy were relatively similar and more or less a filler for something that has to be there (because math) but we don't actually know something concrete about it)

[DesolateGrun]

We got to fight this dark scourge, get Tyson and Hawking on the phone!

[funion]

my crevices are being penetrated all day long

[ironman17]

[QUOTE=Marik Bentusi;35526741]I'm listening.

(I thought dark matter and energy were relatively similar and more or less a filler for something that has to be there (because math) but we don't actually know something concrete about it)[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/while-lhc-hunts-higgs-jefferson-accelerator-looks-illuminate-dark-photons"]Here's an article desrcibing the theoretical dark photon.[/URL]

There's also a thread from about a week back in this subforum.

[Eskill]

Is that why i itch?

[Kendra]

I'm fairly sure the number of dark matter particles theorethically was around 500 billion a second (even more than neutrinos). I heard this in a video a while back so the number may not be right, but it was said by a proper physicist.

You can just imagine at such a high number how little it actualyl interacts.

[Dr. Fishtastic]

your mom's vagina comes gets pounded by dark matter every second

[MightyMax]

[QUOTE=Dr. Fishtastic;35528043]your mom's vagina comes gets pounded by dark matter every second[/QUOTE]
im sorry for your loss.