This is also not a small amount. About 70 to 80 percent of all mass is thought to be mysterious matter known as dark matter. A typical problem is the minority. Everything we can detect all stars, planets, black holes, dust, gas, moon, people.
Where is this dark matter? I do not know. But there are ways to find them, and one of them is right here in the Solar System. On the night side of Jupiter, interaction with this shadow material can produce high infrared radiation in the atmosphere.
There, charged hydrogen ions called trihydrogen cations (H3+) can be found in abundance. Although there are some cosmic processes that can produce H3+ in the Jovian atmosphere, interaction with dark matter can produce more than we think.
“We show that dark matter can produce additional sources of H3+ in planetary atmospheres,” said physicist Carlos Blanco of Princeton University and Stockholm University and Rebecca Lane of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.
This will be produced if the dark matter is dispersed and captured by the planet and the ionizing radiation is eliminated.”
Although we cannot detect dark matter directly, and it does not seem to interact with normal matter as far as we can detect it indirectly, there is a way for it to appear. Objects in space seem to move under the influence of gravity rather than normal matter.
After we subtract the contribution from normal matter, the remaining gravity is due to dark matter. Now we know something exists and we can measure how much it is.
There are many different theoretical candidates for the existence of dark matter, and many of these candidates have properties that can be detected in different ways.
One idea is that dark matter destroys itself. When two dark matter particles collide, they rub off each other, producing some heat or light or both.
Blanco and Leane show that this destruction can occur in the planet’s atmosphere, a layer called the ionosphere. Dark matter particles are captured by the planet’s gravity and absorbed into the ionosphere, where they threaten to destroy each other.
According to the researchers, Jupiter would be the best place to find this process. The largest non-solar body in the Solar System has a relatively cold core, so it would be the strongest dark matter present locally.
When the Saturn probe Cassini flew by Jupiter more than two decades ago, it was equipped with an instrument called the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), which was able to detect signatures of suspected dark matter emissions.
Now, it is the product, not the radiation, of the destruction that we expect to see. The radiation can be ionizing, meaning it removes electrons from atoms in the ionosphere. As a result, the infrared light detected by VIMS causes H3+ to have a positive charge.
The problem is that there are many active ionization processes in the Solar System. Solar radiation can ionize. Jupiter has a large, strong aurora at the H3 + -producing poles. So Blanco and Leane spent three hours observing measurements in the equatorial region of the planet, on either side of the Jovian midnight, where atmospheric effects are minimal and sunlight cannot disturb the ionosphere.
Although no excess H3+ was found, the results allow researchers to place constraints on the behavior of dark matter, providing important information for detecting dark matter on other planets outside the Solar System.
Blanco and Leane wrote “We have shown for the first time that dark matter can produce ionizing radiation in a planet’s atmosphere, Dark Matter Atmospheric Ionization Detectable in Jovian Exoplanets Using Future High-Precision Measurements of Planetary Spectra.”
This research was published in Physical Review Letters.
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