As in politics, it’s all in how you frame things.

[BeAChooser]

Here’s the mainstream astrophysics community trying to *CAST* the billions and billions of dollars and man-hours they’ve spent so far trying to find dark matter in a positive light ….

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-narrowing ... -dark.html

The CAPP axion haloscope at the CAST experiment has hunted for axions from the Milky Way's "halo" of dark matter, and has narrowed down the theoretical space in which to look for these hypothetical particles.

… snip …

But the theoretical space of possibilities for axions is vast, both in terms of their mass and the strength of their interaction with other particles. Axion searches are therefore targeting different regions of this space, each search bringing with it the possibility of discovery and its results guiding future searches.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers working on the CAST experiment at CERN report how they have repurposed part of the experiment to target a previously uncharted region of the axion space.

CAST was originally designed to hunt for axions originating from the sun. In their new study, the CAST team … snip … looks instead for axions from the Milky Way's "halo" of dark matter—an axion haloscope, which they named CAST-CAPP.

… snip …

The CAST researchers scanned this 660 MHz band of frequencies … snip … but did not pick up any signal coming from axions. However, the CAST-CAPP data places new bounds on the maximum strength of the interaction of axions with photons for axion masses of 19.74 to 22.47 microelectronvolts, narrowing down the space in which to look for axion dark matter.

In other words, they failed to find DM axions coming from the sun (which of course they’d expressed high hopes of doing in order to get funding) so they were forced to look elsewhere to stay employed, because they have mortgages to pay and lots of hungry mouths to feed. But that search has also now failed to find signals suggesting DM. So …

The hunt for dark matter continues.

Truth is, it will never end if these folks have their way.

Tune in to this station again to check for updates from CAST-CAPP or from other dark-matter investigations taking place at CERN, such as searches for dark matter that may be produced at the Large Hadron Collider.

They need to keep the tax derived money flowing so they’ve got lots more DM experiments in mind.

Just saying, as long as we let ourselves be forced to give them money … they will find a way to spend it.