An imminent Chinese rocket launch is set to give us a fresh look at dark matter. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is readying the rocket, which will carry the brand new Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) satellite.

Lift-off is scheduled for 17 December in Inner Mongolia, with DAMPE expected to start beaming back data a few weeks later. It will scour the cosmos for protons, electrons and gamma rays, which could reveal smoking-gun signals of dark matter.

“DAMPE will look for signals of dark matter annihilation or decay in the cosmic-ray and gamma-ray data,” says Yizhong Fan, a member of the DAMPE team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing.


The motion of galaxies and other astrophysical observations have provided strong evidence that dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the mass in the universe, but we can’t see it directly because it is invisible to light.

Firming up findings

Hints of the true nature of dark matter have emerged from two other space telescopes, and it’s hoped that DAMPE will clarify those results. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected a glow around the centre of the galaxy, which some researchers think could be caused by particles of dark matter crashing together and being annihilated around the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Gavin Rowell of the University of Adelaide in Australia says DAMPE should be able to shed some light on this because it is better at measuring the precise energy of those gamma rays, which could help test different explanations.

On board the International Space Station is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which has observed other signs of dark matter annihilation. It has detected more positrons – the antimatter sibling of electrons – than expected. This could be the result of dark matter being annihilated nearby, but might also be caused by nearby pulsars.

DAMPE should be able to test which explanation is right, says Fan. It is able to look for even higher-energy electrons and positrons, numbers of which should suddenly drop off if they are caused by dark matter annihilations, but not if caused by pulsars.

Image credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences