{"id":26049,"date":"2016-05-25T14:47:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T21:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/hunting-for-dark-matters-hidden-valley"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:58:43","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:58:43","slug":"hunting-for-dark-matters-hidden-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/hunting-for-dark-matters-hidden-valley","title":{"rendered":"Hunting for dark matter\u2019s \u2018Hidden Valley\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/hunting-for-dark-matters-hidden-valley.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kathryn Zurek realized a decade ago that we may be searching in the wrong places for clues to one of the universe\u2019s greatest unsolved mysteries: dark matter. Despite making up an estimated 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, we haven\u2019t yet figured out what it\u2019s made of.<\/p>\n<p>Now, Zurek, a theoretical physicist at the Department of Energy\u2019s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), says thanks to extraordinary improvements in experimental sensitivity, \u201cWe increasingly know where not to look.\u201d In 2006, during grad school, Zurek began to explore the concept of a new \u201cHidden Valley\u201d model for physics that could hold all of the answers to <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dark+matter\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dark matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI noticed that from a model-builder\u2019s point of view that dark matter was extraordinarily undeveloped,\u201d she said. It seemed as though scientists were figuratively hunting in the dark for answers. \u201cPeople were focused on models of just two classes of <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dark+matter+candidates\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dark matter candidates<\/a>, rather than a much broader array of possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016-05-dark-hidden-valley.html\">http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016&#45;05-dark-hidden-valley.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn Zurek realized a decade ago that we may be searching in the wrong places for clues to one of the universe\u2019s greatest unsolved mysteries: dark matter. Despite making up an estimated 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, we haven\u2019t yet figured out what it\u2019s made of. Now, Zurek, a theoretical physicist [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26049","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\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26049"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67422,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26049\/revisions\/67422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}