YOU could be forgiven for thinking that particles that whizz through the planet with no effect are inconsequential. Not so.
Such particles 鈥� neutrinos 鈥� occasionally interact with matter, producing flashes in particle detectors. 鈥淪terile鈥� neutrinos, on the other hand, are even harder to find as they are loath to interact with ordinary matter 鈥� a characteristic that makes them a prime candidate for being the stuff of dark matter. Since their 鈥渄iscovery鈥� in the 1990s, though, their existence has been heavily debated.
Now physicists have repeated the original experiment and found that this ethereal entity may not be a mere statistical error (see 鈥淪terile neutrino back from the dead鈥�). If it turns out that sterile neutrinos are not a figment of our imagination, we may finally have answered one of the most pressing questions in cosmology.
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