It was published in April in the journal Physical Review D.
Their paper, co-authored with colleagues Harrison Winch and Jagjit Singh Sidhu, examines the mechanism by which macros might trigger lightning, as well as several other novel means for searching for evidence of macros. But unlike ordinary lightning, which is jagged, these macro-induced bolts of lightning would be straight as an arrow, according to physicist Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University, and his son Nathaniel Starkman, a physics graduate student at the University of Toronto. Normally, such an ion channel would be invisible-but if there happens to be an electrical storm underway, the channel would offer a conduit for lightning. If a macro happened to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, it would release so much energy it would strip the electrons off the atoms that it pushed aside, creating a long, pencil-thin channel of charged particles, known as ions, in the air. But, crucially, macros are unlikely to be just sitting around more likely, they’re whipping through space with speeds of between roughly 150 and 300 miles per second (compared to roughly a half mile per second for a rifle bullet). However, because of their extreme density (several hundred pounds per cubic inch), all of that mass would be packed into a space about the size of a bacterium. These clumps may weigh as much as a few ounces, perhaps the weight of a golf ball. The idea is that dark matter, rather than being composed of elementary particles, is actually made up of macroscopic clumps of matter. Macros are one of several alternatives to WIMPS that have been put forward. But numerous such experiments have found nothing so far-leading some scientists to wonder if dark matter may be made of something else altogether. Typical WIMP searches employ huge vats of an ultra-dense liquid such as xenon if a dark matter particle hits the liquid, physicists should be able to see the radiation emitted by atomic nuclei as they recoil from collisions with WIMPs. These hypothetical objects are called “weakly interacting massive particles,” or WIMPs. The leading theory is that dark matter is made up of elementary particles, perhaps created some 14 billion years ago at the time of the Big Bang. The case for dark matter has been building since the 1930s, when astronomers first noticed that galaxies move as though they contain more matter than what we can actually see with our telescopes as a result, researchers believe there must be a large quantity of unseen matter along with the ordinary, visible stuff.
They believe that these speeding chunks of dark matter, known as “macros,” would trigger perfectly straight lightning bolts, which have never been documented.
#Dark lightning zip#
If we carefully study the flashes seen in ordinary lightning storms, they argue, we just might find evidence of super-dense chunks of dark matter as they zip through our atmosphere. Now a team of scientists has proposed a very different strategy for searching for signs of dark matter, not by means of particle physics laboratories, but by examining the air above us. So far, those searches have come up empty. For decades, astronomers and physicists have been flummoxed by the mystery of dark matter, spending billions of dollars on sophisticated detectors to search for the elusive particles believed to account for some 85 percent of the matter in the universe.
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