Soaking up cosmic rays from its permanent perch on the International house Station, the AMS is intended to check the universe’s deepest secrets — what happened to any or all the antimatter, and what, within the name of all creation, is dark matter?
“The nature of dark materials is that the nice mystery of our time,” said Peter Fisher, an MIT physicist concerned within the project.
The AMS traveled a protracted and circuitous path to succeed in Friday’s launch. The Department of Energy experiment, nearly twenty years within the creating, involves some sixty0 researchers at 60 establishments across sixteen countries. It price somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion — apparently, nobody has quite nailed down a value tag. it had been virtually canceled entirely when NASA dropped it from the launch manifest when the Columbia disaster, however scientists, most notably Nobel laureate and principal investigator Samuel Ting, convinced NASA to place it back on the schedule.
The AMS is Ting’s brainchild — some would even argue his albatross — and if it works as planned, detecting the telltale signs of dark matter, it might probably win him another Nobel.
The AMS is reasonably like an orbiting version of the particle detectors within the giant Hadron Collider. At its heart may be a powerful cryogenically cooled permanent magnet that bends incoming particles, during this case from cosmic rays, beams of high-energy materials belched toward Earth from dying stars, black holes and different cosmic phenomena. The method the particles bend within the magnetic field reveals their charge.
The 7-ton AMS canister conjointly contains trackers to live incoming particles’ energy and velocity, which can tell physicists specifically what they’re viewing.
AMS was designed at CERN and tested within the LHC, that helped calibrate its instruments. it had been already detecting cosmic particles whereas being ready for launch, Ting said last fall.
The system is thus sensitive that it will detect one single anti-nucleus in an exceedingly ocean of billions of atomic nuclei. It will live particles with energies of a hundred million TeV — to place that in perspective, the LHC, typically known as the world’s biggest science experiment, sends particles zooming around at a comparably trivial seven trillion electron volts and measures their collisions.
The atmosphere strips these ultra-high-energy cosmic particles of a number of their qualities, thus physicists have long been angling for a space-based detector. The AMS is technically known as AMS-02, as a result of an earlier version flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1998. Incidentally, that was conjointly the last mission to the Russian outpost Mir.
That mission, that lasted simply ten days, detected some terribly bizarre signatures — together with a doable “strangelet,” an elementary particle created from strange quarks yet as up and down quarks. the quality model of particles and forces says there are six flavors of quarks (the building blocks of protons and neutrons), however as so much as scientists will tell, everything is formed of simply 2 — the up and down flavors. If these strangelet particles exist in any type of abundance within the cosmos, AMS can see them.
From a purely mathematical purpose of read, nothing ought to — antimatter and traditional matter ought to have annihilated one another within the initial moments when the large Bang. however they did not, and also the universe was left with a preponderance of matter over antimatter, and so one thing instead of nothing. Some recent studies at ground-based particle detectors have shed some lightweight on why this is often the case, however the AMS can take higher measurements. it'll be ready to detect anti-helium or anti-hydrogen — to this point solely trapped in an exceedingly lab — that might be proof for antimatter galaxies, or perhaps parallel universes product of antimatter.
The AMS will sniff out the weak signatures of dark matter, that is six times additional abundant than the “normal” matter we will see. AMS is sensitive enough to detect new categories of weakly interacting large particles (WIMPs), and signals within the background positron, anti-proton, or gamma ray flux that would show dark matter is gift.
Such lofty goals are a fitting finale for the house shuttle, that helped scientists discover dark matter within the initial place, through its delivery of the Hubble house Telescope.
While of these bizarre prospects are exciting, in an interview with BBC, Ting said he hoped the experiment would transcend even his wildest dreams.
“To my collaborators and me, the foremost exciting objective of AMS is to probe the unknown, to look for phenomena that exist in Nature however nevertheless we've got not the tools or the imagination to search out them,” he said.
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