Paparazzi out PAMELA - August 27, 2008
Earlier this month, we wrote about rumours that an Italian experiment called PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) had seen an intriguing signal. The cliff-notes version: PAMELA sees more positrons (anti-electrons) than expected, which may in turn be a signal from dark matter—mysterious stuff that floats around our cosmos and has never been seen.
PAMELA's results have been shrouded in mystery. So far, the researchers involved have only flashed their data on screen at a few conferences, for fear that the press would get a hold of the results before they were published in a peer-review journal. Such precautions are taken when submitting to journals like ours, but in this particular case, it's left a lot of physicists miffed.
Well now it appears that some enterprising individuals have scooped PAMELA. As reported by Jester on his popular physics blog Resonaances, somebody has "graphically extracted" the PAMELA data from their presentation at a conference last week in Stockholm. "Graphically extracted" is open for interpretation, but I'm guessing it means that they took a picture.
In any event, the new paper is here, and the cat, it would seem, is out of the bag.
