What :

• World’s most sensitive dark matter experiment
• Operated deep underground at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy

What is in news : With advanced technologies and newer experiments, and researchers of  XENON1T have made the first putative direct detection of dark energy.

How did they make the detection :

• There will be Some background noise and the electrons in XENON1T will on average move a bit on their own even with no dark matter or dark energy around simply by virtue of “kicks” due to this background
• At energies around ~2 keV there are way more events than one expects simply due to noise and this could be due to dark energy

What if the signal was caused by some other force :

• The team constructed a physical model, which used a screening mechanism known as chameleon screening, to show that dark energy particles produced in the Sun’s strong magnetic fields could explain the signal seen in XENON1T.
• There are four fundamental forces in our universe, and speculative theories have proposed a fifth force – something that can’t be explained by the four forces. To hide or screen this fifth force, many models for dark energy use special mechanisms.

DARK ENERGY

• Dark Energy is a hypothetical form of energy that exerts a negative, repulsive pressure, behaving like the opposite of gravity.
• It is causing the rate of expansion of our universe to accelerate over time, rather than to slow down. That’s contrary to what one might expect from a universe that began in a Big Bang.
• It makes up about 68% of the universe.