A South Dakota mine is the venue where the Large Underground Xenon Detector, a device designed by scientists, would be activated to detect the presence of dark matter, a substance that makes up 25% of the existing universe, which has long eluded scientists for the past few decades. It was lowered this into a 70,000 gallon water tank nearly a mile beneath the earth’s surface insulated enough to help it insulate dark matter from cosmic radiation that masks the substance on the earth’s surface.
The discovery of dark matter will shake the entire scientific community as it can answer the origins of the universe and the behavior of reality. Harry Nelson, a physics professor in the University of California and also a principal investigator of the project, stated that the experiment might be brutal or expensive, but it would be as astounding as the discovery of the Higgs boson earlier this year.
Regular matter, such as in the physical world, makes up 4% of the physical universe. Dark matter makes up at least 25% of the universe and the other parts, such as dark energy, still remains a mystery to most scientists.
Right after the Homestake Gold Mine in the Black Hill’s Lead in South Dakota shut down, scientists applied for permissions to use the site for experiments, which had the LUX move into the Sanford Underground research facility which is 4850 feet below the earth’s surface.
The detector, roughly the size of a telephone booth, is submerged in water running through reverse osmosis to deionize and clean it to make it more sensitive to detecting dark energy. Xenon in both liquid and gas form will fill the detector and continuously circulate through a purifier, similar to an osmosis machine.
