When you became lost, in years past, the only tools you had to find your way back home, were maps, a compass, or maybe the memory of directions given in haste. Now, there are smartphones, online maps, and even GPS systems to navigate and lead you in the right direction.
In fact, the GPS system can do many things, like guide you to the best place to eat, help you find a hiking trail, and even offer more than one route to your destination. Recently, it was found that the GPS satellite system could also locate the dark matter.
It’s not like we have to push further to prove that dark matter exists, it just does. In the past, dark matter has proven its existence by bending light around galaxies. Now, however, we have much more to go on!
An astounding theory is that dark matter is composed of large gas-like defects or energy cracks. As these imperfections pass within the range of the atomic clocks, the presence of dark matter causes a change in synchronization. GPS satellite devices are actually the largest dark matter detectors, processing results that detect the slightest change is passing through and leaving an imprint.
Using 30 GPS satellites, paired with atomic clocks, Andrei Derevianko of the University of Nevada and Maxim Pospelov of the University of Victoria and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada checked and found many discrepancies in time. These discrepancies lasted from a billionth of a second up to 3 minutes.
Results like this cannot be ignored.
This reinforces the fact that dark matter cannot be measured as a solid particle form of matter. It is something much more mysterious than that. In fact, science can only explain 5% of the universe’s mass and energy.
It is simply amazing that even though dark matter and energy cannot be seen or felt, it can be measured as 70% dark energy and 30% dark matter. This doesn’t include everything else in existence!
Derevianko has been collaborating with Geoff Blewitt, director of Nevada Geodetic lab, developing data from the largest GPS processing center in existence. Here, information is monitored from over 12,000 stations in the entire world. With this much data, it is safely said that we can move forward with the more in-depth acquired information.
Maybe someday, we will be able to understand all there is to know about the universe. For now, we can marvel in the newly discovered attributes of dark matter, one of the most mysterious forms of matter in existence.
