Four images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory of an X3.2-class flare from late at night on May 13, 2013.
Credit: NASA/SDO

WASHINGTON: The Sun has unleashed four potent solar flares this week, marking the most intense activity yet this year and causing limited interruptions to high-frequency radio communications.

One of them was classified as an X3.2 flare, with X-class flares being the most intense type, NASA reported.

“This is the strongest X-class flare of 2013 so far, surpassing in strength the two X-class flares that occurred earlier in the 24-hour period,” the U.S. space agency said of the flare that peaked at 0111 GMT Tuesday.

A fourth X-class flare peaked at 0148 GMT on Wednesday, NASA said.

Measuring at X1.2, it caused a temporary radio blackout that has since subsided, and was categorised as “strong,” or R3 on a scale of 1 to 5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s space weather scales.

The latest flares began on May 13 and have sent off bursts of radiation from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The strongest traveled particularly fast, at a speed of approximately 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometres) per second, NASA said.

The CMEs have so far not been directed at the Earth, but may impact satellites.

NASA said the CMEs would produce a merged cloud of solar material that “may give a glancing blow to the STEREO-B and Epoxi spacecraft,” which are space-based observatories orbiting Earth to monitor solar storms and comets.

“Their mission operators have been notified. If warranted, operators can put spacecraft into safe mode to protect the instruments from solar material,” the U.S. space agency said.

Experts say that a rise in solar activity is common right now because the Sun is in a phase of its 11-year activity cycle that is nearing the solar maximum, expected in 2013. According to space weather experts at NOAA, more strong solar flares may be expected in the coming days.

Although CMEs send off potent radiation, Earth is protected by its magnetic field.

Solar activity can temporarily disrupt GPS signals and communications satellites, but most people will not notice any effects in their daily lives.

The first X-class flare of this solar cycle occurred in February 2011. The largest so far of the current cycle was documented as an X6.9 in August 2011.

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Composite image of Earth and Mars created to show the relative sizes of the two planets. Credit: NASA / JPL

WASHINGTON: NASA and private sector experts now agree that a man or woman could be sent on a mission to Mars over the next 20 years, despite huge challenges.

The biggest names in space exploration, among them top officials from the U.S. space agency and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, will discuss the latest projects at a three-day conference starting May 6 in the U.S. capital.

Renewed interest in the red planet has triggered the launch of several initiatives in recent months, including one proposing a simple one-way trip to cut costs.

75% want NASA budget doubled

The American public also favours sending astronauts to Mars, according to a survey by non-profit group Explore Mars and aerospace giant Boeing.

The poll in March of more than a thousand people published found that 71 % of Americans expect that humans will land on Mars by 2033.

Seventy-five percent say NASA’s budget should be doubled to 1 % of the federal budget to fund a mission to Mars and other initiatives.

NASA receives only 0.5 % of the U.S. federal budget, compared to 4 % during the Apollo project to land on the Moon in the 1960s.

The U.S. space agency’s chief Charles Bolden has stressed that “a human mission to Mars is a priority.”

But the U.S. financial crisis is a major obstacle to such a project.

“Money, not miracles”

“If we started today, it’s possible to land on Mars in 20 years,” said G. Scott Hubbard of Stanford University, in California, USA.

“It doesn’t require miracles, it requires money and a plan to address the technological engineering challenges,” added Hubbard, who served as NASA’s first Mars program director and successfully restructured the entire Mars program in the wake of mission failures.

Placing a mass of 30-40 tonnes – the amount estimated to be necessary to make a habitat on the red planet – would be one of the greatest challenges, along with the well-known problem of carrying or producing enough fuel to get back, Hubbard stressed.

The Curiosity rover took a nail-biting seven minutes in August 2012 to make its descent on Mars. But it only weighed one tonne.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity mission, which is set to last at least two years, aims to study the Martian environment and to hunt for evidence of water in preparation for a possible future manned mission.

Astronaut health a consideration

Robotic missions will therefore be necessary to prove the system works before scientists can even contemplate sending humans aboard.

NASA is developing a Space Launch System and the Orion capsule for distant space exploration.

Hubbard said a nuclear engine should be developed for any vehicle headed to Mars because it would provide a continuous thrust and thus reduce travel time by about three months, as well as reduce the risk of radiation.

The distance between Earth and Mars varies between 35 million and 250 million miles (56 million and 400 million kilometers), depending on the planets’ position.

In addition to the technological challenges, the negative impact of long space journeys on the human body are not yet well known, especially with respect to cosmic radiation.

“Space radiation exposure is certainly a human risk we need to address and understand,” said Stephen Davison, manager of NASA’s Space Biology and Physical Sciences Program at Johnson Space Centre where astronauts are trained.

Davison said it was important to understand “both the cancer risk to our crew members in more detail and also the effects on the central nervous system.”

He added that more than half of crew members at the International Space Centre have experienced some degree of change in their vision, and also have experienced intra-cranial pressure.

Other physiological changes, such as reduced bone density and muscle loss, can be mitigated by exercise.

The third major challenge is a psychological one, for isolated astronauts who spend long periods of time confined in cramped spaces.

Davison said scientists need a “minimum” of 10 years to complete research about the trip’s impact on the human body before going to Mars.

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International Space Station Credit: NASA

WASHINGTON: A lab experiment that rode to space two years ago has offered new clues about why astronauts’ immune systems struggle to perform in zero gravity, U.S. military researchers said.

Researchers sent cells found on the inside of blood vessels to the International Space Station and let them rest for six days. Then, astronauts introduced the cells to a potent endotoxin lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, that can cause widespread blood infection known as sepsis.

After six days of simply being in space, the cells began to show genetic changes that are typical of lowered immunity in zero-gravity, a condition often seen in astronauts.

New clues for treating sepsis

“When we added the agonist, they didn’t respond very well,” said Marti Jett, director of the Integrative Systems Biology Program at the U.S. Army Medical Command, who presented the research at the Experimental Biology 2013 conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Scientists replicated the experiment on Earth to see how the infections progressed under normal gravity conditions compared to those in space.

The experiment has offered new clues in hunt for treatments for sepsis, which researchers said strikes about 750,000 Americans every year and can be deadly if left untreated. Sepsis is a leading cause of death after surgery.

Previous research has shown how being in space can take a toll on astronauts, ranging from loss of bone density and muscle to raising the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

And the military researchers realised, in the course of the study, that they had seen similar effects in Army Rangers who saw their immunity dip while under the stress of an intensive training regimen.

“A wonderful environment for microbes to flourish”

According to Saralyn Mark, a medical consultant to NASA who was not involved in the study, doctors are keen to learn more about the way space and stress affects the immune system so they can keep astronauts healthy on long-term missions.

“Space is a wonderful environment for these microbes to flourish, it is almost like they are coming home in a way,” she said.

“Then you have got this other issue where your immune system is becoming impaired, and that is a very difficult equation. It can set you up for increased infection,” she added.

“Is it the impact of microgravity? Is it the impact of radiation on the immune system? We are looking at all those parameters to see how the body is adapting.”

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Julian Berengut, theoretical physicist. Credit: Michael Gal

JOB: Theoretical physicist
LOCATION: Sydney, Australia
INSTITUTION: University of New South Wales

FOR JULIAN BERENGUT, research into the fundamental physics of the universe goes beyond pure science and into the philosophical question of human existence – with surprising crossovers into the world of art.

A theoretical physicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, Berengut is researching whether the “fundamental constants of nature” – such as the speed of light – are the same everywhere in the universe, throughout space and time.

“There’s a kind of philosophical question that we’re trying to answer as well,” Berengut says. “Why are we here? If you look at the laws of physics, they seem to be perfectly correct for life to exist. If the laws of physics were different, then we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.”

IN 2012, BERENGUT and the research teams of UNSW physicists John Webb and Victor Flambaum won a Eureka prize for revealing a miniscule change in the ‘fine structure constant’ – a physical constant that dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force – towards the edges of the visible universe. The cutting-edge research, conducted using powerful telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, has the potential to upset the popular notion that the laws of physics are constant everywhere in the universe, Berengut says.

However, the idea that the laws of physics vary is a huge claim, he adds, and the small gradient observed will need to be backed up by solid evidence if its to sway physicists on the sturdiness of their Standard Model.

“To the extent that we’ve seen any evidence at all of variation to the fundamental constants, it [still] suggests that the entire visible universe is roughly the same as this bit of it,” Berengut says.

But the visible universe – about 14 billion light years in any direction – is just a fraction of the entire universe (or universes), which may, indeed, be infinite. This means that a barely perceptible change in the laws of physics 14 billion light years away could be extrapolated into something more significant, given the immensity of space and time the physicists have to work with.

To test the hypothesis, Berengut is working with incredibly precise atomic clocks to measure changes in fundamental constants over time. If the Eureka award-winning astronomical observations are correct, the fundamental laws should be changing ever so slightly right here, too, given Earth itself is continually moving through space and time.

It’s the bigger picture questions that inspire Berengut in his research, he says, and in addition to his day job at UNSW he occasionally collaborates with his wife, Sydney artist Connie Anthes.

“What’s been fun is finding intersections between science and art,” he says. “Contemporary art and science are really different brain spaces, but there are actually also a lot of similarities there.”

In one performance project, called Imposter Complex, staged at the Damien Minton Gallery in Redfern, NSW, in 2012, Berengut and Anthes gave simultaneous five-minute lectures on the other’s topic area of expertise. “There were times when there were some resonances, and then at times it was so discordant,” Berengut says, adding, “and then we were both talking out of our arses a little bit as well.”

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Artists’ renditions of the relative sizes of the newly discovered habitable-zone planets and Earth. Left to right: Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Earth.
Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON: Using a powerful NASA space telescope to scan the skies for planets like ours where life might exist, astronomers said they have found the most Earth-like candidates yet.

Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone – not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water, researchers said in the journal Science.

“These two are our best candidates that might be habitable,” said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Centre.

The two planets are slightly larger than ours, and at least a couple of billion years older.

The first, 62e, is about 40% larger than Earth. It might be warm, maybe even a waterworld, and may experience flashes of lightning, said Borucki.

The second, 62f, is about 60% larger than our planet, and orbits its star every 267 days, close to Earth’s annual trajectory of 365 days. The planet may have polar caps, significant land masses and liquid water, Borucki said.

Both are orbiting a seven-billion-year-old star some 1,200 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

They are close enough to their star to be warm, but not so near as to boil the oceans. They are far enough to maintain the likelihood of water without freezing the seas solid, Borucki explained.

Scientists do not yet know if their surfaces are rocky or watery, or if they have atmospheres that could sustain life. But their location and size suggest they “could plausibly be composed of condensable compounds and be solid, either as a dry, rocky super-Earth or one composed of a significant amount of water,” said the study.

Other studies have indicated that planets with a radius under 1.6 times that of the Earth, like these two, “have been found to have densities indicative of a rocky composition.”

Astronomers detected the planets by observing their star dim when the planets pass in front of it, in what is known as a “transit.”

“These are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet,” said Justin Crepp, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA.

Crepp first saw a dot near Kepler-62 about a year ago, and has studied the movements of the system for months in order to confirm the discovery.

A third potentially habitable planet, Kepler 69c, is on the “inner edge of what has been considered to be the habitable zone,” said Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, California. However, that one may be small and hot and more like Venus, the second planet from our sun, said Barclay, whose research was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

“We’re not sure yet,” he told reporters. Its host star, Kepler 69, is about 2,700 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

Altogether, the latest findings add seven new planets – four of which are outside the habitable zone – to the tally that Kepler has found so far, totaling more than 2,700 candidates and confirmed planets.

In late 2011, NASA confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system – Kepler 22b, spinning around its star some 600 light years away. However, the large size of that exoplanet, at 2.4 times the size of the Earth, has left some doubt over whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid. Another large planet that Kepler has confirmed in the habitable zone, Kepler 47c, is also much bigger than Earth.

Kepler, launched in 2009, is NASA’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours. It is equipped with the largest camera ever sent into space in its search for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.

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This set of images (click to enlarge) shows what might be hardware from the Soviet Union’s 1971 Mars 3 lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA

ARIZONA: Hardware from a Soviet spacecraft that went silent only seconds after making the first successful soft landing on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both orbiter missions were successful, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm. The Mars 2 lander crashed, but Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet. Unfortunately, after just 14.5 seconds transmission from the lander stopped, for unknown reasons.

Now, Russian citizen enthusiasts following NASA’s Curiosity rover identified what may be the Soviet Mars 3 lander hardware while poring over high-resolution photos taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera. Mounted on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, the camera has been imaging the Martian surface since 2006.

The features in the image resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features.

The predicted landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degree east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. The HiRISE camera acquired a large image at this location in November 2007. This image contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, so about 2,500 typical computer screens would be needed to view the entire image at full resolution. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found only very recently.

Vitali Erogov from Russia is the founder and administrator of the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity. Subscribers of this community engaged in the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Expected hardware included the parachute, the heat shield, the terminal brake rocket and the actual lander.

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Erogov made scale models of what each piece should look like at the HiRISE image scale and carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.

One of the group’s advisors was Alexander “Sasha” Basilevsky, who is well known to the international science community. Basilevsky contacted Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for HiRISE, suggesting a follow-up image.

MRO acquired this image on March 10. The image was targeted to cover some of the hardware candidates in colour and to get a second look with different illumination angles, to provide more information. No colour anomalies are seen in the images, which is understandable after more than 40 years of dust deposition. Meanwhile, Basilevsky and Erogov contacted Russian engineers and scientists who worked on Mars 3 for some more information.

The candidate parachute is the most distinctive and unusual feature in the images. It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 25 feet in diameter. The parachute would have a diameter of about 36 feet if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent. In the second HiRISE image, the parachute appears to have brightened over much of its surface, probably due to its better illumination over the sloping surface, but it is also possible that the parachute brightened in the intervening years because dust was removed.

HiRISE recently showed that the Curiosity parachute has shifted in the wind, which might also kick off dust. Since the parachute from Viking Lander 1 (1976) can still be seen as a bright area, it is reasonable that a slightly older parachute would also remain visible, perhaps because dust is kicked off.

“The bright spot is definitely an unusual feature,” said McEwen. “There is no similar feature anywhere else on these images, which we would expect if it was a natural bright spot of some sort. In the second image with more overhead illumination, it is clearly the brightest spot here.”

McEwen added that it differs from the parachutes used by U.S. Mars landers because it isn’t elongated due to the lateral velocity of the backshell attached to the parachute. The Soviet design resulted in a vertical descent that is expected to leave a more circular parachute on the ground.

The descent module or retrorocket was attached to the lander container by a chain, and the candidate feature has the right size and even shows a linear extension that could be a chain. Erogov was later informed that at a length length of slightly under 15 feet, the chain is a good match to the line in the image (almost 16 feet). This might have resulted from dragging the chain and disturbing the surface. Nearby the candidate descent module is a feature with the right size and shape to be the actual lander, with four open petals.

The image of the candidate heat shield matches a shield-shaped object with the right size that is partly buried.

“Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out,” McEwen said. “Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation.”

“I wanted to attract people’s attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone,” Egorov said. “At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.”

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Graphic depicting the Earth flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 on February 15, 2013. Larger asteroids could soon be towed into the Moon’s orbit to become permanent manned outposts in space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON: NASA wants to grab a small asteroid and tow it into orbit around the Moon, as part of a long-range plan towards establishing permanent manned outposts in space, according to a U.S. senator.

To get the project off the ground, U.S. President Barack Obama will propose around $100 million for the U.S. space agency in his 2014 budget, which he submits to Congress on Wednesday, Senator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

“This is part of what will be a much broader program,” the Florida Democrat explained.

Asteroid mining and deflection, and reaching Mars

“The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars.”

The plan calls for a robotic-spacecraft to capture the asteroid and tow it back towards Earth, ultimately leaving it in a stable orbit around the Moon, close enough that, within eight years, astronauts could head on over.

A similar plan was initially proposed in 2012 by experts at the California Institute of Technology, and the group, along with other top researchers in the field, have since prepared a detailed study into the project’s feasibility.

Towards human settlement in space

“It would be mankind’s first attempt at modifying the heavens to enable the permanent settlement of humans in space,” scientists said in their report.

Obama’s goal of sending a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 is impossible given NASA’s current and projected funding levels, expert analysis has suggested.

But using an unmanned vehicle to instead bring a 500-tonne asteroid close to home could change the game and get humans to an asteroid as early as 2021, four years ahead of the deadline.

Once there, “there could be mining activities, research into ways of deflecting an asteroid from striking Earth, and testing to develop technology for a trip to deep space and Mars,” Nelson’s statement said.

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A frame from a recording of a solar storm on 9 November 2000 by the orbiting TRACE telescope. Credit: TRACE Project, NASA

BRUSSELS: Europe has launched its first space weather coordination centre to raise the alarm for possible satellite-sizzling solar storms that also threaten astronauts in orbit, plane passengers and electricity grids on Earth.

Though impossible to predict, a worst-case scenario mega-storm can happen at any time, leaving the world without Internet, telephones, television, electricity and air and rail transport for days on end.

Limited precautions can be taken, but early warning is key, say experts at the European Space Agency (ESA) which runs the centre from Brussels.

“Disturbance without warning … can be dangerous”

“A pilot can always land a plane… because they have alternatives (to satellites) for navigation, but if they get the disturbance without warning, at the wrong time, that can be dangerous,” Juha-Pekka Luntama, head of ESA’s space weather division said at the launch.

Even a slight satellite glitch can put navigation out by 100 metres – enough to miss a runway.

Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere protect the planet from radiation released during solar flares and geomagnetic storms – some of the most severe forms of space weather.

Smaller eruptions usually have little noticeable effect – perhaps slight problems with car navigation systems or mobile phones. But a major solar storm on the scale of an event in 1859 that crippled global telegraph systems could have severe impacts today.

A “coronal mass ejection” – which sends electromagnetic radiation flying towards Earth at a speed of some 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) per second and plays havoc with long transmission lines – caused surges on telegraph lines so strong in 1859 that offices caught fire and operators received electric shocks.

Solar event more likely in next two years

Such super storms happen “only very occasionally, perhaps once or twice a century,” according to ESA’s human spaceflight director Thomas Reiter.

Luntama added that the most severe storms statistically happen around the solar maximum – a period of greatest activity in the 11-year solar cycle – where we are now.

“In some ways you can say that the next two years is the time period that a solar event is more likely,” he said.

An 1859-like storm today could claim about 50 to 100 satellites – 10% of the total in orbit, at a cost of billions of euros, according to ESA.

But probably the biggest threat to Earth lies in electric power grid surges.

“In the worst case, what could happen is that the transformers in the power grid are damaged and in that case, replacement of the transformers can take weeks or months,” said Luntama.

Even if only a small part of the grid is damaged, overloading in neighbouring systems can lead to more blackouts that spread domino-like, such as the nine-hour power blackout in Quebec in Canada in 1989.

Solar storm warning time and precautions

Astronauts orbiting Earth on the International Space Station (ISS), closer to the source of the radiation, could be at high risk of a severe solar storm, as could plane crews and passengers flying over the polar regions.

Precautions would include turning off satellites to lessen the risk, reducing the load on power grids, astronauts taking cover in well-shielded part of the ISS, and planes being diverted or even grounded if communications become unreliable.

Once witnessed by space weather watchers, the fallout from a solar storm takes between 17 and 48 hours to reach Earth, depending on its severity.

The coordination centre, a central point for space weather enquiries, will draw on the expertise of dozens of European universities, research institutions and private companies.

A similar service already exists in the United States.

For the moment, the ESA service – funded by 14 member states – is free.

The centre started operating six months ago and is expected to be fully operational by 2020 – part of wider, multi-billion euro ESA system that also tracks objects in space that pose a collision threat.

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The flux of cosmic rays near Earth can come from many sources. ‘Primary’ particles (green) typically from a supernova remnant. ‘Secondaries’ (yellow) come from these particles colliding with interstellar gas and producing pions and muons, which decay into electrons and positrons. A third possibility is that electrons and positrons (purple) are created by the annihilation of dark matter particles in the Milky Way and its halo. The background image used here is of Andromeda, a spiral galaxy roughly similar to ours. Credit: GALEX, JPL-Caltech, NASA; Drawing: APS/Alan Stonebraker

WASHINGTON: A massive instrument circling the globe aboard the International Space Station has provided a first glimpse of what may be mysterious dark matter in the universe.

The elusive nature of dark matter – which surrounds the galaxy in a near-spherical halo and is believed to make up around a quarter of the universe – is considered one of the most important riddles in physics.

Dark matter has only been observed indirectly through its interaction with visible matter, and is not explained by the standard model of physics. But that could change, with data collected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), the most sensitive particle physics spectrometer ever sent to space, made by a 16-nation team at a cost of $2.5 billion.

“A new physics phenomena”

The machine arrived at the orbiting outpost aboard the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour’s last flight in 2011. The first results from the AMS seem to indicate “evidence of a new physics phenomena,” said a press statement from the international research team.

The AMS studies cosmic rays – charged high-energy particles that permeate space – before they interact with Earth’s atmosphere.

Of the 25 billion cosmic ray events the AMS has studied so far, “an unprecedented number, 6.8 million, were unambiguously identified as electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons,” said CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

AMS spokesman Samuel Ting said more experiments in the coming months should indicate whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or not.

“We are going to solve this problem”

There is still a chance that the signals could result from pulsars, or neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation.

“There is no question we are going to solve this problem,” Ting told reporters.

Scientists are pinning their hopes on the AMS because its accuracy is “unmatched by any other experiment,” said Ting, a Nobel laureate and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“Our evidence supports the existence of dark matter but cannot rule out” other origins, such as pulsars, he said, stressing that scientists are not yet convinced either way, but are awaiting more data.

The findings appear in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“Major impact to our understanding of nature itself”

Michael Salamon, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science program manager for AMS, described the latest measurements as “exciting,” but preliminary.

“It is very important to say there may be a very common, prosaic explanation for this excess. It could be due to pulsars, for example. We don’t know,” he told reporters.

“The fact is AMS has made a high-precision measurement and in the future, with more statistics, we are going to learn more about the nature of this excess. And if nature is kind, we might have a very exciting discovery in the future,” he added.

The AMS is expected to keep operating until 2020, or as long as the ISS stays in operation.

“If we detect dark matter and learn something about its nature we will have made a major impact to our understanding of physics and nature itself,” Salamon said.

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