The Absurd Search For Dark Matter

i am at a gold mine a couple hours outside of melbourne because one kilometer underground they're putting in a detector to look for dark matter let's go it's gonna take 30 minutes to go down a kilometer underground dark matter is thought to make up 85 of all the matter in existence it could form a shadow universe five times more massive than everything we can see over the past several decades over 50 experiments have tried to make a direct detection of dark matter but none of them has found anything except one under a mountain in the italian alps there is a dark matter detector called damalibra it's been collecting data for around 20 years and every year it sees the same peculiar results the rate of detections increases to a peak in june and then decreases to a minimum in november some scientists think this could be the first direct evidence of dark matter but why would dark matter create a periodic annual signal well this is our galaxy or at least what it looks like with visible light astronomers suspect it is surrounded and permeated by a huge sphere of dark matter invisible particles that are zipping around all in random directions according to most theories dark matter doesn't interact with anything including itself except through gravity we think there should be five times as much dark matter as there is ordinary [Music] now our solar system is moving around the galaxy at 220 kilometers per second that means we're also moving through dark matter at this rate except earth orbits the sun at 30 kilometers a second so for half the year we're moving with the sun going faster through dark matter and the other half the year we're moving in the opposite direction so going slower through dark and the idea is we encounter more dark matter when we're moving through it fastest which happens to be in june and less of it when we're moving slowest which happens in november the actual geometry is a little more complicated the solar system is tilted at 60 degrees relative to the plane of the galaxy but the idea still works so the signal observed at dhamma libra may be due to this motion through dark or it might not be due to dark matter at all it could just be something mundane like the ...