{"id":212668,"date":"2025-04-29T01:27:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T06:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/combing-through-the-suns-corona-for-dark-matter"},"modified":"2025-04-29T01:27:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T06:27:14","slug":"combing-through-the-suns-corona-for-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/combing-through-the-suns-corona-for-dark-matter","title":{"rendered":"Combing Through the Sun\u2019s Corona for Dark Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/combing-through-the-suns-corona-for-dark-matter.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have turned NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe into a dark-matter detector, taking advantage of its close encounters with the Sun to search for dark-photon signals.<\/p>\n<p>Dark matter is an elusive but consequential substance. It accounts for 27% of the total energy content of the Universe and plays a crucial role in the formation of cosmic structures, acting as the skeleton for the \u201ccosmic web\u201d of galaxies [1]. However, its nongravitational interactions with known particles remain a mystery. Among the many types of dark-matter particles that have been proposed, a compelling candidate is the ultralight dark photon [2]. Just as the photon mediates the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles, the dark photon would mediate interactions between a hypothetical set of dark particles. Researchers have previously looked for dark photons using lab-based particle detectors and Earth-bound telescopes. But now Haipeng An from Tsinghua University in China and his colleagues have utilized a unique vantage point next to the Sun to search for a dark-photon signal [3].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have turned NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe into a dark-matter detector, taking advantage of its close encounters with the Sun to search for dark-photon signals. Dark matter is an elusive but consequential substance. It accounts for 27% of the total energy content of the Universe and plays a crucial role in the formation of cosmic [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}