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Argon gas from Cortez will be sent to this underground research lab in Italy – the largest in the world – in an attempt to find the elusive dark matter. The international effort hopes to understand one of the biggest mysteries in the universe./ Courtesy Photo
Unlocking the mystery Southwest Colorado could play key role in discovering dark matter by Jonathan Romeo
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ould Southwest Colorado help unlock one of the longest standing mysteries of the universe? It turns out, yeah, it actually could. “Thanks to this argon gas found in Southwest Colorado, it could be the next big step in discovering dark matter,” Cristiano Galbiati, a Professor of Physics at Princeton University, said on a Zoom call last week while in Italy. “It’s been a long time coming. It’s huge.” OK, we know you’re wondering: What’s argon gas? What’s dark matter? Did someone slip me an edible? To put it simply, 85% of the matter in the universe is unknown and unaccounted for, and “dark matter” is the term scientists use to describe it. While experiments have been conducted for decades to nail down what dark matter actually is, we still have virtually zero knowledge or understanding of it. However, researchers are confident that an experiment right here in our backyard in Southwest Colorado will likely lead to a massive breakthrough. Basically, scientists from around the world have teamed
8 n May 19, 2022
Dark matter is “ simply what we call this thing which we know nothing about. We shouldn’t call it anything, because we don’t know what it is.
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– Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire
up with Kinder Morgan, which drills for carbon dioxide around Cortez, to extract a gas known as “argon” that scientists say
will help finally detect the existence of dark matter. “With what we’re doing in Colorado, we
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can now do more precise searches for dark matter,” Andrew Renshaw, an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Houston, said. “And if we can understand dark matter, we can understand the universe around us.” Understanding the unknown To try and wrap our heads around the concept of dark matter, we turned to YouTube and the friendly face of astronomy, Neil deGrasse Tyson. “My best answer is, we haven’t a clue,” Tyson said, unhelpfully. “We don’t even know if it is matter; dark matter is simply what we call this thing which we know nothing about. We shouldn’t call it anything, because we don’t know what it is.” Wow, that wasn’t helpful. So, we clicked on more of Tyson’s YouTube videos. Basically, Tyson explained when you add up all mass in the universe – the stars, galaxies, planets, comets, black holes, etc. – the total mass does not add up to the speed and rate of gravity operating in the universe, according to the laws of gravitation. This anomaly was first discovered in the early 1930s but has since been detected in every single galaxy, amounting to an unex-
