Dark matter and Cancer ?!

So we all know that our universe is made of atoms and thus made of matter, but the most surprising thing that we have discovered about the universe is that we don't know what it is made of... Of course its made of matter, but it only is a small percentage of matter...The rest dark matter and dark energy........










Astronomers know it exists because something in the universe is exerting significant gravitational forces on things we can see. When they measure the effects of this gravity, scientists estimate that dark matter adds up to 23 percent of the universe. Normal matter accounts for just 4.6 percent. And another cosmic mystery known as dark energy makes up the rest – a whopping 72 percent .

So the big question is :  How do scientists study the stuff when they can't see it?


But lets get down to basics.....How do we even know that dark matter exists? Could it be that the whole scientific community wanted to play a prank on us and came with the word "Dark matter" to make us feel......excited? Nope, Dark matter is real 100% no joke.....

How do we even know that dark matter exists? 

Easy get a weighing scale and measure the weights of galaxies...

Yeah no, you can't do that... but that is the way scientist found out about Dark matter. By weighing galaxies.... astronomers hoped to measure was the mass of a galaxy.

 But you can't just weigh something the size of a galaxy – you have to find its mass by other methods. 

One method is to measure the light intensity, or luminosity. The more luminous a galaxy, the more mass it possesses. Another approach is to calculate the rotation of a galaxy's body, or disk, by tracking how quickly stars within the galaxy move around its centre. 

Variations in rotational velocity should indicate regions of varying gravity and therefore mass, but here where the problem came up.

When astronomers began measuring the rotations of spiral galaxies in the 1950s and '60s, they made a puzzling discovery. 

They expected to see stars near a galaxy's center, where the visible matter is more concentrated, move faster than stars at the edge. What they saw instead was that stars at the edge of a galaxy had the same rotational velocity as stars near the centre. 

Astronomers observed this first with the Milky Way, and then, in the 1970s, Vera Rubin confirmed the phenomenon when she made detailed quantitative measurements of stars in several other galaxies, including Andromeda 

The implication of all of these results pointed to two possibilities: Something was fundamentally wrong with our understanding of gravity and rotation, which seemed unlikely given that Newton's laws had withstood many tests for centuries. Or, more likely, galaxies and galactic clusters must contain an invisible form of matter – hello, dark matter – responsible for the observed gravitational effects. As astronomers focused their attention on dark matter, they began to collect additional evidence of its existence.

So now what's up with Dark matter and cancer?

Dark matter is made of WIMP's. I mean obviously Weakly interacting Massive Particle. So that means that Although dark matter make 26% of our universe it doesn't necessarily interact with normal matter which we can interact with on a daily basis .If the dark matter within our galaxy is made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), then millions, possibly billions, of WIMPs must pass through every square centimeter of the Earth each second.

Our solar system goes around the center of the Milky Way in an orbit that takes some 220 million years to complete. We therefore move into the dark matter which ought to move around the galaxy in a non-rotating fashion, and hence dark matter particles pass (rapidly) through the Earth all the time. The probability that a dark matter particle interacts with the matter that we are made of is small, but every once in a while it ought to happen.

There are now many experiments under way looking for these rare interactions between dark and visible matter. The experiments consist of large tanks that contain certain atoms with desirable properties. Different experiments use different atoms, but they all search for the tiny recoil that an atomic nucleus would get from a dark matter particle. The detectors then either measure the heat created by this interaction, or the light that some atoms emit following the interaction, called “scintillation.”

So let's take our body for a while now and count how many atoms are in it? A healthy 70 kg adult would have around 7*10^27 atoms in the body give or take a few. And considering that occasionally dark matter may interact with the earth which has a whopping 10*50 atoms we can calculate he fact that the probability of Dark matter just interacting with you would be...

10^27*7/10^50 which gives you 7e-23= 0.0000000000000000000000.1.

So yeah basically none. Also we haven't considered the fact that your Cells should go out of control and start a Cancer. So despite that being cool that you could get cancer from dark matter its pretty impossible!!!!!! 

DNA for building Dark matter detectors....

But there is neat way to track the direction of incoming dark matter particles which was proposed by Drukier et al. in a 2012 paper. Their idea is to use the breaking of straight (not curled up), closely spaced, DNA strands to reconstruct the recoil of an atom hit by dark matter.

Their experiment works as follows: wait until a dark matter particle interacts with a thin layer of gold, and kicks out one of the atoms. The gold atom carries on much of the momentum of the dark matter particle, so it will continue into about the same direction. Below the gold layer there are the DNA strands hanging, and whenever the gold atom hits one, the DNA is likely to break. From the dark matter particle, the gold atoms get about enough energy to break a few hundred of the strands.

Now if one knows the sequence of the DNA strands being used, they constitute basically a coordinate system. What one has to do then is sweep up the broken off DNA ends, find out where they were broken, and reconstruct the path of the gold atom, thereby revealing the direction from which the dark matter particle came.

But what really intrigues me is why only DNA? We could use any Nano Polymer to do so. According to the paper which the idea was published it does seem pretty good. Who knows if the undetectable could be detected by something that every living thing on the planet has......Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid.

, DNA