Discover Interview: The Dark Hunter

Physicist Elena Aprile is certain that dark matter exists. She just hasn’t found it yet.

By Fred Guterl
Nov 17, 2010 6:00 AMNov 12, 2019 4:52 AM
aprile.jpg
At Columbia University's Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York, Elena Aprile sits in front of a new liquid-xenon-filled detector that is key to her search for dark matter. | Doron Gild

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Dark matter sounds like some physicist’s tall tale: There’s this invisible matter, see, and it has this powerful gravitational effect on galaxies. That’s why we know it exists. In fact, it outweighs ordinary matter by about five to one. Problem is, dark matter doesn’t reflect or absorb light, so we can’t see it. Oh, and it rarely interacts with conventional atoms, so we can’t feel it, either. However, we know it makes up a huge part of the universe, so we keep looking for it.

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