Will Our Sun Shed Light on the Darkest Mystery of the Universe?

Your mother always told you not to stare at the sun. But scientists know better than to listen to "other people" when there's an interesting question to be asked, and in astrophysics the biggest question of all is "Where is everything?" Cosmological calculations indicate that the vast array of objects we can detect are just foam on top of a vast invisible sea of matter we can't detect, and two teams think the key to the undetectable lies in our very own star.

This mysterious material is called "dark matter", on the highly scientific grounds that we can only see things which are bright. There are various candidates for this ghostly galactic gruel, any number of which could be correct. They all share the quality of only barely interacting with ordinary matter - so how stuff which, by definition, barely affects the visible universe is meant to make up so much of it is question for your philosophers. The scientists just want to see it.

One of the underdog expressions of the invisible stuff is the axion. Less a new particle, more a new form of something we've already seen, the axion is thought to be a new state which photons (light particles) can be driven into (or pulled from) by intense magnetic fields. While photons are massless, people capable of math which would cause our brains to leak out or ears have shown that the axion could have the required properties. All we have to do now is catch one.

The CERN Solar Telescope project in Geneva has built a superconducting magnet, which they hope will convert the ethereal solar axions back into detectable flashes of X-Rays. A Berkeley team is instead counting on the coronal magnetic field of the sun itself, using satellite imaging to map the photons from this intense field. This might allow them to find the signature variations of axion-photon conversion, though considering the sun is a vast fusion reactor for producing light, it'll be a case of finding the Nobel-prizewinning needle in the luminescent haystack.

Posted by Luke McKinney.