ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — What is dark matter? It’s the invisible substance that makes up about 25% of the universe — it’s like if you think about the wind. You can’t actually see it, but you know it’s there because you see its effects: the leaves on the trees moving. Dark matter has never been directly detected, but now, UAlbany researchers have found something that could be it.
“It’s been two years, we’ve scrutinized it and can’t explain it,” asserted Cecilia Levy, associate professor of physics. She and Matthew Szydagis, also an associate professor of physics at UAlbany, along with 250 colleagues from across the globe are using LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) to detect dark matter, leveraging liquid xenon to do so.
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“It’s just a really good general particle detector,” Syzdagis noted.
They measure the light that’s emitted from particle interactions with the xenon…