Yesterday results from the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) located aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were announced.
The AMS has been detecting incoming cosmic rays for the past several years before they interact with the Earth's atmosphere. The results, stemming from the analysis of over 25 billion recorded events, detected over 400,000 positrons or anti-matter particles. This was the largest detection ever in space for anti-matter and has significant possibilities in the search for dark matter.
The AMS international team of over 600 scientists is hoping that additional research will be able to zero in on the origin of this anti-matter. The prime suspect is that dark matter interactions are creating the detected particles but more work has to be done to totally eliminate the possibility that the particles are coming from pulsars in our galaxy.
The team expressed high confidence that in the upcoming months they will be able to eliminate the pulsars as a source and be able to zero in on dark matter as the cause or origin. Doing so will go a long way in furthering our understanding of this unseen and unknown component that makes up 25% of the Universe.
Read More About It: http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/04/ams-experiment-measures-antimatter-excess-space
and
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/ams_on_station.html
Sky Guy in VA
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