On Earth, however, we are constantly surrounded by low, nondangerous levels of radioactivity coming from trace elements – mainly uranium and thorium – in the environment, as well as cosmic rays from space. Over the past 30 years, scientists have developed an experimental program to try to detect the rare interactions between WIMPs and regular atoms. ![]() WIMPs in the Milky Way theoretically fly through us on Earth all the time, but because they interact weakly, they just don’t hit anything. “WIMP” captures the particle’s essence quite nicely – it has mass, meaning it interacts gravitationally, but it otherwise interacts very weakly – or rarely – with normal matter. One popular guess is that dark matter is a new type of particle, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP. I’m a physicist interested in understanding the nature of dark matter.
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