Watching the Sun for 11 years apparently pays dividends.
A complete survey of all the particle and antiparticle activity that goes on during the Sun's 11-year cycle has found previously unknown ways these particles behave. Cosmic rays coming from outside the Solar System bring these particles closer to the Sun, where they experience changes caused by heat and other types of solar energy. It is possible that antimatter might have something to do with dark matter, and even the origins of the universe. On Earth, the Sun may seem the same every dawn that it rises and every dusk that it sets, but our star actually goes through solar cycles of fluctuations that each last 11 years. As scientists have watched our star over this most recent 11-year cycle, it has revealed previously unknown ways that changes in solar activity have affected energetic particles and cosmic rays. A huge part of this new understanding has been made possible by the The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) particle physics detector on the International Space Station (ISS), which has observed billions of cosmic ray events from low Earth orbit. In the search for dark matter and antimatter—which could be holding secrets about the origins of the universe—it uses magnetic fields to separate particles from cosmic rays based on their electric charge before measuring the masses and energies of those particles. Analyzing these particles separately is important because the…