Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

pizzathyme

> it’s far too early to claim a discovery, physicists warn...“How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt, a particle astrophysicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and co-founder of the LZ project. “We just decided we should publish and think really, really, really hard about what that event could be.” Very hard to manage jumping the gun by reporters. Sounds like they saw some new data. No idea what it is. Looking forward to the follow up.

rajaravivarma_r

I always wondered if it would happen in my lifetime. Hope it turns out to be something interesting (AKA) dark matter.

SaberTail

I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds. So it's certainly interesting! That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years. [1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Pre...

lordnacho

So you have 7 tons of Xenon as the detector, hoping that some dark matter will bump into a nucleus. How do you exclude other effects?

amemi

Not well informed on the topic- but the title made me think of the recently launched Roman Space Telescope. The difference: LUX-ZEPLIN, which is underground, is waiting to detect a dark matter particle itself. On the other hand, NGRST seeks to observe the effects of dark matter.

parineum

> If the new result is real, more signals should emerge soon. LZ researchers have already collected three times as much data as they used in the paper. It sounds like this implies they've seen 3x more events but it seems like they would have said that if it were the case. Have they just gathered more data about the single event or is this 4 separate events they're talking about?

scotty79

Why couldn't it be just a weirdly energetic neutrino originating from the neighborhood of some black hole?

petcat

> The detector lurks 1480 meters deep in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, in a former gold mine in South Dakota. Glad to see such things getting re-purposed instead of just sealed off and abandoned.

gwbas1c

I think it's cool that there's still unconfirmed hypothesizes, and still unexplained phenomena in the science that's investigating these hypothesizes. I hope this turns into a real discovery about something; but even if it's an equipment malfunction, hopefully it's a lesson that can be turned into improving the detector.

advisedwang

> Such behavior could require dark matter to be more complicated than just a single new type of particle. For example, the dark matter particle might have some internal structure, like an ordinary atom, so it would only interact if hit hard enough to excite it to a higher energy internal state I get a little shiver imagining that the dark matter might be something like ordinary atoms. Imagine that other 85% of the universe could have its own parallel atomic table, chemistry, even some kind of life utterly alien to us?

DrJokepu

This is 1σ. It’s fun and interesting, but means nothing.

wewewedxfgdf

Such detectors will never see dark matter because it is little black holes.

I_am_tiberius

i have zero knowledge of physics, but I just can't believe something like dark matter exists. My intuition is that some math just isn't correct and falls apart at the scales of the observable universe. No idea what equations are used for getting to the reslut of having 85% unexplained matter in the universe, but I really assume there's just a constant missing or our math in general just inaccurate or not considering specific effects.

hirshi

How many years until we've discovered "everything"?