The search for dark matter in the universe could end tomorrow; if a supernova appears nearby and a little luck. The nature of dark matter has eluded astronomers for 90 years, ever since they realized that 85% of the matter in the universe is invisible to our telescopes. The most likely candidate for dark matter today is the axion, a light particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.

Astrophysicists at the University of California at Berkeley say the axis could be detected within seconds of detecting gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion. Within the first 10 seconds after the core of a massive star turns into a neutron star, large amounts of axons, if any, will be produced and these axons will escape in the intense magnetic field of the star and turn into high-energy gamma rays. .

Such a detection would only be possible today if the Fermi Space Telescope, the only gamma-ray telescope in orbit, is pointed in the direction of the exploding supernova. Given the telescope’s field of view, this is about a 1 in 10 chance.

However, a single gamma-ray detection would allow us to accurately determine the mass of an axon, particularly the QCD axon, over a wide range of theoretical masses, including the mass ranges currently investigated in experiments on Earth. However, the lack of detection would eliminate the wide potential mass range for the axon and render most current searches for dark matter pointless.

The problem is that a supernova must occur nearby (within our Milky Way galaxy or one of its companion galaxies) for gamma rays to be bright enough to be detected, and nearby stars only explode once every few decades on average. The last nearby supernova occurred in 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s moons. The then-obsolete Solar Maximum Mission gamma-ray telescope pointed in the direction of the supernova, but was not sensitive enough to detect the predicted gamma-ray intensity, according to an analysis by the UC Berkeley team.

“If we were to see a supernova like supernova 1987A with a modern gamma-ray telescope, we could detect or exclude this QCD axis, this most interesting axis, in most of the parameter space, in fact the entire parameter space,” says Benjamin Safdie of UC Berkeley, “and parameter space and parameter space that are impossible to explore in the laboratory.” Much of space can also be explored in the laboratory,” said Associate Professor of Physics and senior author of a paper published online Nov. 19 in the journal Physical Examination Letters. “And this will all happen in 10 seconds.”

But researchers worry that we won’t be ready to see the gamma rays produced by axons when a long-awaited supernova explodes in the nearby universe. Scientists are now talking with colleagues who build gamma-ray telescopes to evaluate the feasibility of launching one or more such telescopes to cover 100% of the sky 24/7 and capture any gamma-ray bursts. They even proposed a name for their constellation of full-sky gamma-ray satellites: GALactic AXion Instrument, or GALAXIS, for Supernova.

“I think all of us involved in this paper are worried about the next supernova before we get the equipment,” Safdie said. “It would be a shame if a supernova exploded tomorrow and we lost our chance to detect the axion; it might not come back for another 50 years.”

Safdi’s co-authors are graduate student Eugene Park and postdoctoral researchers Claudio Andrea Manzari and Inbar Savoraj. All four are members of UC Berkeley’s physics department and the theoretical physics group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.