Monday, March 29, 2004

Seasonal WIMP variation?

OK, this story from BBC is just silly. The Damo experiment in Gran Sasso is looking for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and finding a seasonal variation. Somebody (not clear from the article) proposed that this was due to the Earth moving in and out of a filament of WIMPs and other particles pulled from the Sagittarius galaxy (orbiting our own).

Except that the stream would have to be incredibly narrow: on the order of a hundred million km. How is a stream of stuff, pulled from a source about 8 E20 meters away, wind up only about 1 E11 meters wide here at our solar system? That's a cone size of about 1/100 of a microradian. Laser beam spreads are usually measured in milliradians...

OK, error on my part. I forgot how cocked our orbit is wrt the galactic plane, and I was using different numbers for the WIMP speeds (much higher). With speeds this slow, and with the Earth's orbit cocked with respect to the putative WIMP flow, you could see a seasonal effect. I still suspect they're seeing changes in the quality of the electric power they get as a function of consumer demand.

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