Dark matter hinted at again at Cresst experiment

According to BBC News, the finds must be reconciled with other experiments that have recently hinted at the detection of Wimps.

The results were revealed at the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics meeting in Germany on Tuesday.

They have also been posted on the physics website Arxiv , complementing the data of other "direct detection" experiments.

Dark matter was initially proposed to explain how galaxies hold together; from what we know about how gravity works, much more matter is required to hold galaxies together than we can see.

Many candidates for what dark matter actually is have been proposed, but most explanations have been refuted by experiments.

What seems to align best with both theory and experiment so far is a class of particles that tend not to interact with the matter we know: weakly interacting massive particles, or Wimps.

Though dark matter is imagined to be everywhere, permeating the Universe and clumping around galaxies, it is estimated that some Wimps may pass through our entire Galaxy without interacting with any normal matter.

Details also at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14811580