A team of scientists have built an underground lab in Australia to help hunt for dark matter. One might say they’re hoping to shed light on the mystery that is dark matter.
The Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) is touted as being the new epicentre of dark matter research in Australia and is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne, The Australian National University (ANU), ANSTO, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Adelaide.
It is located a kilometre underground in Stawell, in the Northern Grampians in Victoria and officially opened on Friday.
It is here that a team of Aussie scientists will gain a better global understanding of dark matter.
“Dark Matter remains elusive, and there are only a handful of labs across the globe capable of making meaningful investigations. Australia has just put itself on the map when it comes to this exciting field of science,” ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt said.
Dark matter is a substance that doesn’t absorb or emit light. Dark matter is theorised to be an invisible and unknown substance that makes up about 85 per cent of the mass of the universe.
In the ultra-low radiation deep underground environment, scientists will use the state-of-the-art SABRE (Sodium iodide with Active Background Rejection) Dark Matter Detector to ‘see’ dark matter, and answer some of the biggest questions in physics.
Humankind’s first detection of dark matter, ANSTO said, would confirm the theory that it was dark matter particles that provided the gravitational seeds for the formation of galaxies.
The challenge, however, is that while its effects have been observed, dark matter has remained undetected, meaning much about its nature is unknown.
That’s where the Aussie team of scientists and the new lab come in.
The lab, located in a disused gold mine, includes a research hall that is 33 metres long, 10 metres wide and 12.3 metres high. Around 4,700 cubic metres of rock was excavated in its construction.
The Universities of Melbourne, Adelaide and Swinburne and ANU all worked with ANSTO (ANSTO operates highly sensitive radiation detectors at Lucas Heights and they advised on the extremely low background radiation environment to operate the SABRE Dark Matter Detector) and Stawell Gold Mines on the lab, and the federal and Victorian governments each contributed $5 million to the project.
The dark matter research will be coordinated by the Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, headquartered at the University of Melbourne.