Dark Matter Just Got Darker: How New Results Are pushing Massive Dark Matter To the Brink

We do not know where 80% of the mass in our Universe comes from. This missing mass is called Dark Matter. One leading possibility is that dark matter may not be so different from ordinary matter-similar to neutrinos, but just a bit heavier. These dark matter candidates are referred to as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (or WIMPs).
However, recent results (2024-08-24) from the LUX-Zeplin (LZ) Collaboration have further pushed these models to the limit (see newscenter.lbl.... Additional null results will likely signal the death of the WIMP hypothesis. This means that dark matter is even darker and harder to find than we previously anticipated.
In this episode, we'll explore what dark matter is, why the WIMP hypothesis is intriguing, and how experiments are coming close to putting this idea to rest.

[@shawns0762]

Dark matter is dilated mass. Mass that is dilated is smeared through spacetime relative to an outside observer. It's the phenomenon our high school teachers were talking about when they said "mass becomes infinite at the speed of light". This doesn't mean mass increases, it means mass becomes spread throughout spacetime relative to an outside observer. A graph illustrates its squared nature, dilation increases at an exponential rate the closer you get to the speed of light. A time dilation graph illustrates the same phenomenon, it's not just time that gets dilated.
Dilation will occur wherever there is an astronomical quantity of mass because high mass means high momentum. This includes the centers of very high mass stars and the overwhelming majority of galaxy centers.
The mass at the center of our own galaxy is dilated. This means that there is no valid XYZ coordinate we can attribute to it, you can't point your finger at something that is smeared through spacetime. In other words that mass is all around us.
Dilation does not occur in galaxies with low mass centers because they do not have enough mass to achieve relativistic velocities. It has been confirmed in 6 very low mass galaxies including NGC 1052-DF2 and DF4 to have no dark matter. In other words they have normal rotation rates. All binary stars have normal rotation rates for the same reason.