Researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno suggest that the Global Positioning System (GPS) can be used to detect dark matter.
Scientists believe that 25 percent of the Universe is made of dark matter. It is so dark that there is nothing visible for observations, no radiation passes through it, and it is not antimatter due to the absence of gamma rays, according to Science Codex. There is no direct evidence that the dark matter exists, but scientists believe that it is composed of baryonic or non-baryonic matter, and they used this belief to find this hard-to-spot object.
Now, two physicists suggest that the GPS can be used, along with other atomic clock networks, to detect and measure dark matter. Andrei Derevianko, of the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Maxim Pospelov, of the University of Victoria and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, suggest tracing the energy emitted by the dark matter using the said tools.
The proposal suggests that when the atomic clocks go out of sync, that will be an indication that dark matter is present. GPS will then be used to determine its exact location and to measure its extent.
Derevianko is working with Geoff Blewitt, director of the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory, also in the College of Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, in testing this detection method by analyzing 30 GPS satellites.
"The Earth sweeps through this gas as it orbits the galaxy. So to us, the gas would appear to be like a galactic wind of dark matter blowing through the Earth system and its satellites. As the dark matter blows by, it would occasionally cause clocks of the GPS system to go out of sync with a tell-tale pattern over a period of about 3 minutes. If the dark matter causes the clocks to go out of sync by more than a billionth of a second we should easily be able to detect such events," Blewitt said in a news release.
Further details of the proposal can be read online in Nature Physics.
