14 DAY TRIAL // According to a paper published in the online journal arXiv, it would appear that dark matter interacts with the human body more often than scientists first calculated. The new results suggest that the elusive stuff interacts with atoms in our bodies around 100,000 times per year.
Dark matter is a quantity that was introduced in cosmological models in order to explain why galaxies tend to clump together. The large-scale structures of the Universe – clusters, superclusters, galactic walls and so on – cannot be explained through the force of gravity alone.
Astrophysicists have determined that dark matter must account for around 23 percent of the entire mass-energy budget of the Cosmos, with 4 percent made up of baryonic matter, and 75 percent made up of dark energy.
Despite numerous research efforts, scientists have thus far been unable to discover actual evidence that dark matter exists. They believe that the stuff is made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP), which only affect baryonic matter through the force of gravity.
However, every now and then, a WIMP is believed to collide with baryonic atoms or subatomic particles. The question experts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Stockholm University, in Sweden, wanted to answer is how often does this happen in reality.
Our planet, and indeed our entire solar system, is flying around the galactic center in a sea of dark matter, which implies that we are being impacted by WIMP – if this is indeed what the elusive stuff is made up of – constantly.
Scientists believe that billions of dark matter particles are going through our bodies every second, with the vast majority of these particles leaving no discernible trace behind. For this research, they modeled the human body as a 70-kilogram lump of meat made up of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen.
These are the main elements of which our bodies are constructed. In their models, researchers Katherine Freese and Christopher Savage included the fact that WIMP are more likely to interact with oxygen and hydrogen. They determined that about 100,000 collisions occur within each human yearly.
Past studies on the topic had indicated that only 30 such collisions occurred during the same time frame. At this point, there is no way of knowing the health impacts that exposure to dark matter has on humans.