This Australian experimenter is looking for elusive particles that could help unlock the mysteries of dark matter
Australian scientists are making strides to solve one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: the invisible nature of “dark matter”. The ORGAN Experiment, Australia’s first major dark matter detector, recently completed the search for a hypothetical particle called an axion — a popular candidate among theories trying to explain dark matter. ORGAN has placed new limits on the possible characteristics of axions and thus helped to narrow their search. But before we get ahead of ourselves… Let’s start with a story About 14 billion years ago, all the tiny bits of matter – the fundamental particles that would later become you, the planets and galaxies – were compressed into one very dense and hot region. Then the Big Bang happened and everything flew apart. Particles combine to form atoms, which eventually clump together into stars, which explode and create all kinds of exotic matter. After a few billion years came the Earth, which finally crawled on the little things called humans. Cool st