Research duo calculate possible number of WIMPs striking our bodies
(Phys.org) -- Katherine Freese and Christopher Savage from the University of Michigan and Stockholm University respectively have embarked on a whimsical bit of physics research. Theyve been estimating the number of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), thought by some to be instances of dark matter; that stuff that fills in the holes in physics theories that cant be explained any other way, that likely strike the human body on a yearly or even minute by minute basis. They have found, as they describe in their paper theyve uploaded to the preprint sever arXiv, that in their estimation, billions of WIMPS pass through every human body on Earth every second. But only a small fraction of those actually hit something such as the nuclei of an oxygen or hydrogen atom. They say most assumptions about dark matter would put the collision rate at something like thirty times a year. If new...