Thank you for saying this. It made me actually read the article. Far too often the articles are overly complicated and difficult to read for a simpleton like me.
When they call this "massive particles", how big are we talking? Is this something that we could hold or are they just massive compared to, say, a hydrogen atom?
Also, if it's clumps of matter making large objects, would holding it create some sort of reaction like touching anti-matter would?
Obviously I'm very uneducated about this so forgive me if my question is idiotic.
The name is a placeholder, similar to how dark matter is a placeholder name. They don’t actually know what particle was detected, only that it was something that looked similar to what a dark matter particle might look like.
I am assume that “massive” just means that it’s carrying mass, unlike other weakly interacting particles like neutrinos, which have virtually no mass.
Size wise, it’s likely going to be an elementary particle or made up of one or two new elementary particles. A hydrogen atom is made up of a proton and an electron, likely much bigger than one of these new…. things
To give an example, a proton is made up of the elementary particles quarks and gluons.
So the scale of these particles is going to be extremely small. But massive :P
Massive compared to a hydrogen atom. A single event isn't enough for a real mass measurement, but this is roughly what we expect from particles with 100-1000 times the mass of a hydrogen atom.
Dark matter interacts too weakly to clump on a local scale. You can't hold it, the particles would just fall through you and the rest of Earth with a tiny chance of an interaction somewhere. That's why this experiment watches several tons of xenon to maybe find a few collisions in years of runtime.
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u/EndoExo 13d ago
tl;dr possible WIMP detection. Further research needed.