4 Dark Matter Searches to Watch in 2019.

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A photo shows the underground water tank where LUX-ZEPLIN will eventually sit.
Credit: LBL
▼ 2018 was a big year for dark matter.
As usual, astronomers didn't actually find any of the stuff, which is invisible to all our telescopes but appears to make up at least 80 percent of the universe by mass.
There were reports of a dark matter hurricane, but we can't actually see it. A galaxy was discovered that seemed not to have any dark matter, which oddly would have proved dark  matter existed. But then it turned out that the galaxy may have dark matter after all— leaving the existence of dark matter in doubt for some physicists. Multiple experimentsthat were supposed to directly detect dark matter here on Earth turned up nothing.
So, where does that leave scientists hunting for dark matter as we head into 2019? Pretty optimistic, all things considered. The hunt for dark matter presses forward on all fronts.
From massive underground detectors to huge sky surveys, here are the five major steps in the hunt for dark matter to look forward to in 2019.
LIGO comes back online

The LIGO project operates two detector sites: one near Hanford in eastern Washington, and another near Livingston, Louisiana (shown here).
Credit: IGO Collaboration
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the American detector that directly observed the first gravitational waves in 2015, will begin its third observation run in early 2019, collecting more data than ever before after a series of upgrades to its equipment.
So what's a gravitational-wave detector doing in an article about dark matter? It turns out that there are a lot of tantalizing  possibilitiesfor uncovering hints of dark matter using gravitational-wave data — though none of them have yet been realized.
Researchers in 2018 proposedthat if a "dark photon" with a very slight mass lurks somewhere in the universe, its signal might turn up in LIGO data, causing very specific irregularities in the signatures of gravitational waves.
“We show that both ground-based and future space-based gravitational wave detectors have the capability to make a [conclusive dark matter] discovery,” the researchers wrote.
With LIGO back online, turning up evidence for dark matter in gravitational-wave data is very much a live possibility.
Physicists will try to figure out whether MiniBooNE gave up the ghost of a neutrino (▪ ▪ ▪)

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