{"id":89885,"date":"2019-04-24T10:43:27","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T17:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/dark-matter-detector-observes-rarest-event-ever-recorded"},"modified":"2019-04-24T10:43:27","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T17:43:27","slug":"dark-matter-detector-observes-rarest-event-ever-recorded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/dark-matter-detector-observes-rarest-event-ever-recorded","title":{"rendered":"Dark matter detector observes rarest event ever recorded"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dark-matter-detector-observes-rarest-event-ever-recorded.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe\u2014dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal <i>Nature<\/i>, researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 1.8 \u00d7 10<sup>22<\/sup> years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe actually saw this decay happen. It\u2019s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dark+matter+detector\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dark matter detector<\/a> was sensitive enough to measure it,\u201d said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, and co-author of the study. \u201cIt\u2019s an amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The XENON Collaboration runs XENON1T, a 1,300-kilogram vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1,500 meters beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy. The researchers search for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dark+matter\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dark matter<\/a> (which is five times more abundant than ordinary matter, but seldom interacts with ordinary matter) by recording tiny flashes of light created when particles interact with xenon inside the detector. And while XENON1T was built to capture the interaction between a dark matter particle and the nucleus of a xenon atom, the detector actually picks up signals from any interactions with the xenon.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2019-04-dark-detector-rarest-event.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\">Read more<\/div>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe\u2014dark matter. In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, researchers announce that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89885","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\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}