Scientists upgraded the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, an instrument located beneath the surface in South Dakota called the Large Underground Xenon (LUX).
According to BBC News, dark matter makes up about 95 percent of the universe, but is invisible and can only be detected by seeing it interact with other objects. LUX's upgrade will help the instrument seek out weakly interacting massive particles (Wimps), which astronomers believe make up dark matter.
"We have looked for dark matter particles during the experiment's first three-month run, but are exploiting new calibration techniques better pinning down how they would appear to our detector" Alastair Currie, a physicist at Imperial College London who lead the research, said in a press release. "These calibrations have deepened our understanding of the response of xenon to dark matter, and to backgrounds. This allows us to search, with improved confidence, for particles that we hadn't previously known would be visible to LUX."
LUX is now outfitted to seek out collisions between Wimps and xenon atoms, which results in a small flashes of light. Before the recent upgrade, Wimps were incredibly elusive and hard to spot because of how faint their signals are.
"Since LUX's first run, we have developed several new calibration techniques and methods of analysis," Alex Murphy, of Edinburgh University's school of physics and astronomy, told BBC News. "We are now able to look for tell-tale signs of Wimps in data we previously had to ignore, increasing our chances of detecting dark matter."
