It could be a key to the secret of the universe. Or just annoying background noise, another item to be calibrated in future experiments.

A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy. They are not claiming to have discovered dark matter — or anything, for that matter — yet. But these pings, they say, could be tapping out a new view of the universe.

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

“It’s not dark matter but discovering a new particle would be phenomenal,” said Elena Aprile of Columbia University, who leads the Xenon Collaboration, the project that made the detection.

A team of physicists has made what might be the first-ever detection of an axion.

Axions are unconfirmed, hypothetical ultralight particles from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles. Theoretical physicists first proposed the existence of axions in the 1970s in order to resolve problems in the math governing the strong force, which binds particles called quarks together. But axions have since become a popular explanation for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the mass of the universe, yet emits no light.

If confirmed, it's not yet certain whether these axions would in fact fix the asymmetries in the strong force. And they wouldn't explain most of the missing mass in the universe, said Kai Martens, a physicist at the University of Tokyo who worked on the experiment. These axions, which appear to be streaming out of the sun, don't act like the "cold dark matter" that physicists believe fills halos around galaxies. And they would be particles newly brought into being inside the sun, while the bulk of the cold dark matter out there appears to have existed unchanged for billions of years since the early universe.

Email us to purchase this web site