[The title
was written by my editor. It is not accurate.]
Our extensive network of navigation satellites orbiting the Earth may
serve the dual purpose of helping scientists investigate dark matter.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Global
positioning satellites, or GPS satellites, as they are commonly called, allow
us to navigate like never before. Something fewer people realize about GPS
satellites is that they keep incredibly accurate time. So accurate are these
orbiting clocks that they may serve as our best means of studying the elusive
mystery of dark matter.
The idea
to use GPS satellites and their accurate clocks is based on the notion that if
dark matter exists as kinks or cracks in quantum fields, these kinks will alter
electromagnetic field strengths. The result is a small but potentially
measureable shift in time.
Dark
matter putatively makes up 80 percent of the total matter in the known
universe, but it almost never interacts with ordinary matter. Some believe it
is a yet-to-be-described particle. Andrei Derevianko of the University of
Nevada in Reno and Maxim Pospelov of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo,
Ontario, Candada, are leading the different notion of kinks in quantum fields.
“The
effect is essentially locally modifying fundamental constants,” Derevianko
says.
The GPS
satellite network forms a sphere with diameter roughly 50,000 miles, and it is
traveling through space along with the Earth and solar system at approximately
300 kilometers per second. When the solar system passes through a cosmic kink,
it could take as much as 170 seconds for the entire GPS network to travel
through the kink. This is how the time shift could be measured.
Derevianko
is currently searching through 15 years of archived GPS time data for the
signature perturbations of dark matter. His and Pospelov’s ideas were
published on Monday in Nature Physics.
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