Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 634

Celebrate Star Wars Day with an explosive premiere of ‘The Bad Batch’ on Disney Plus, ,

Meet the bad boys of Clone Force 99 in “The Bad Batch,” 16-episode spinoff of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” on Disney Plus.

The post Celebrate Star Wars Day with an explosive premiere of ‘The Bad Batch’ on Disney Plus, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Skydio starts shipping first X2 enterprise drones with prices from $10,999,

US dronemaker Skydio has begun shipping its first enterprise drones today with prices starting at an enterprise-worthy $10,999. Skydio is best known as a pioneer of self-flying drone tech, but in recent years has shifted its attention away from a consumer market dominated by Chinese giant DJI to courting enterprise customers instead.

This switch is partly due to geopolitics. The US government blacklisted various Chinese drones over spying fears last year, meaning law enforcement, military, and federal customers are looking more to US firms instead. The switch helped boost Skydio to a $1 billion valuation, no doubt assisted by the higher prices such business can command.

Skydio’s X2 drone, which was originally announced last year, comes in two major flavors. There’s the X2D for “defense and federal agencies” and the X2E for “enterprises, first responders, and civilian agencies.” Both units are available in two configurations. The first has dual color/thermal sensors and is “optimized for long range situational awareness” (there’s a 4K60 HDR camera with 16x digital zoom and ~46? field of vision as well as a FLIR Boson 320 x 256 thermal camera with 8x digital zoom). The second has just the color camera (though with the lens upgraded to a ~80? field of view) and is intended for “close-up inspections of infrastructure assets, scene reconstruction, and small area mapping.”

[embedded content]

Prices for the color-thermal configuration, which start shipping today, are unknown, but the color-only units, available only for preorder, start at $10,999. Each drone is bundled with various accessories and the company’s enterprise controller, which features an impact-resistant build, 6.8-inch AMOLED touchscreen, and glove-compatible joysticks.

Along with the drones, Skydio is also launching its Skydio Cloud service today, which provides various fleet management tools. These allow customers to track the status and location of multiple drones in real time, stream footage from any unit, and pool recorded data into one place. It sound’s ideal for large-scale mapping and inspection work.

Despite the focus on enterprise customers, Skydio has said it’s not giving up on hobbyists and amateur drone flyers. The company’s CEO Adam Bry told The Verge last year that more consumer drones are coming, but we’re just not sure when. Until then: watch the skies.

The post Skydio starts shipping first X2 enterprise drones with prices from $10,999, appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Epic spent at least $11.6 million on free games and gained 5 million new users in return, Jon Porter

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A new document released as part of Epic’s legal battle with Apple has revealed how much Epic paid developers to give away their games for free following the launch of the Epic Games Store in December 2018. The document, which was spotted by writer Simon Carless, covers the 38 games given away free between December and September the following year. We already know that Epic is spending millions on its giveaways, but the new document reveals how much that translates to on a per-game basis.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney previously revealed that the company pays a flat fee to each developer to give away their games, rather than paying per download. Over the period covered by the document, Epic paid over $11.6 million in total for the games. In…

Continue reading…

The post Epic spent at least $11.6 million on free games and gained 5 million new users in return, Jon Porter appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Epic spent at least $11.6 million on free games and gained 5 million new users in return,

A new document released as part of Epic’s legal battle with Apple has revealed how much Epic paid developers to give away their games for free following the launch of the Epic Games Store in December 2018. The document, which was spotted by writer Simon Carless, covers the 38 games given away free between December and September the following year. We already know that Epic is spending millions on its giveaways, but the new document reveals how much that translates to on a per-game basis.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney previously revealed that the company pays a flat fee to each developer to give away their games, rather than paying per download. Over the period covered by the document, Epic paid over $11.6 million in total for the games. In response to the deals, almost five million new users signed up to the store, which translates to Epic paying $2.37 for each new user it signed up in this period. That’s money which the company would theoretically make back if each new user went on to buy just one $20 game, based on the 12 percent commission Epic takes on new purchases.

A table showing how much Epic paid for each free game.Image: Epic Games

Beyond the ten months covered in the table, Epic says it’s acquired a total of 18.5 million new users via free game giveaways, and that around 7 percent of them, or about 1.3 million people, go on to make a purchase.

A summary of how many total users Epic’s giveaways have attracted.Image: Epic Games

There’s a huge amount of variance between how much Epic paid for each giveaway. At the top end is the $1.5 million it paid to give away the Batman Arkham trilogy games, but it also paid substantial amounts for Subnautica ($1.4 million) and Mutant Year Zero ($1 million). In comparison, the company paid much less for indie titles like Super Meat Boy ($50,000), Jackbox Party Pack ($60,000), and Fez ($75,000).

At only 38 titles, the list covers less than half of the 100+ games Epic has given away on its store since its launch. It also doesn’t cover one of Epic’s biggest giveaways from May 2020 when it made GTA5 free on its store. Rockstar’s title proved so popular that the store was knocked offline for several hours as everyone tried to claim their free copy.

As well as paying to give away existing games for free, Epic has also paid for upcoming games to be released exclusively on its store. Another document released as part of the legal proceedings and found by Carless reveals that Epic paid a $146 million advance for a deal that included Borderlands 3 exclusivity.

The new numbers were made public as part of Epic’s legal battle with Apple. The Fortnite developer is accusing Apple’s App Store of being a monopoly, and takes issue with the 30 percent commission Apple charges on many in-app purchases. With the court trial having kicked off this week, expect more of the inner workings of each company to be made public in the days ahead.

The post Epic spent at least $11.6 million on free games and gained 5 million new users in return, appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Apple antitrust trial kicks off with Tim Sweeney’s metaverse dreams,

Epic Games launched its courtroom war against Apple in an extremely on-brand way: with CEO Tim Sweeney describing the metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash.

It’s “a real-time, computer-powered 3D entertainment and social medium in which real people would go into a 3D simulation together and have experiences of all sorts,” Sweeney explained to a courtroom partitioned by plastic barriers and a series of teleconferencing hotlines.

The metaverse is Sweeney’s chosen metaphor for Fortnite, the battle royale game that Apple banned from its iOS App Store last year. Epic sued in retaliation, and today, both companies delivered opening statements before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Epic put Sweeney on the stand for hours of exhaustively detailed questions about — among other things — Epic’s Unreal Engine, gaming consoles, the App Store, and what players do on Fortnite’s party island. Along the way, Sweeney positioned Fortnite as something much bigger than a simple video game: it’s “a phenomenon that transcends gaming,” he told the court. And in Epic’s narrative, Apple is unfairly demanding a cut of its profits.

While Sweeney has referred to Epic’s fight with Apple as a “fireworks show,” today’s session wasn’t quite as dramatic as that suggests. Sweeney is a generally soft-spoken man who delivered testimony through a barely audible microphone setup after a long troubleshooting period that involved random teenagers yelling “free Fortnite!” into accidentally unmuted conference lines. Epic’s legal team was responsible for asking questions that set up Sweeney’s statements, resulting in queries both extremely tailored (“How would you define the metaverse?”) and comically general (“Are you familiar with something called a ‘console’?”)

More generally, Apple and Epic were holding battle lines that they drew months ago. “Developers found themselves caught in a trap of Apple’s making,” Epic argued in its opening statement, and “the most prevalent flower in the walled garden was the Venus Flytrap.” Apple countered by calling Epic’s suit “a fundamental assault on Apple’s secure and integrated ecosystem.” In cross-examination, Apple’s attorney pushed Sweeney to confirm that Epic spent nearly a decade playing by Apple’s rules before launching an operation codenamed “Project Liberty” to flout them. Both sides promoted high-minded ideals (freedom for Epic, security for Apple) and appeared shocked — shocked — that their opponent was trying to make money.

But hearing the arguments laid out helped clarify which tactics seem most likely to stick. Epic and Apple frame Epic’s demands very differently. Epic mostly stuck to discussing its most moderate request: that Apple let developers process in-app purchases through their own systems, bypassing Apple’s fee. Apple highlighted the most extreme ask: that Apple let iPhone owners side-load third-party app stores like the Epic Games Store. The former would be a big hit to Apple’s profits. The latter would transform iOS and poses security concerns that are much easier for Apple to lay out. (These are separate demands, so Judge Rogers could end up finding both parties’ arguments here compelling.)

Apple’s attorney didn’t finish cross-examining Sweeney on Monday. But he hammered on Epic’s willingness to deal with gaming companies like Sony, who lock down their consoles in ways that Apple compares to the iPhone. Sony, for instance, requires Epic to pay if a user plays Fortnite mostly on PlayStation but spends lots of money on another platform like PC. But Epic hasn’t complained about that deal.

On the other side, Epic can point to an intuitive sense that the iPhone platform is bigger and more all-encompassing than the Xbox or PlayStation. But Sweeney and its attorneys have drawn a much finer distinction involving its business model, saying that console makers typically sell their hardware at a loss, so they have an incentive to treat developers better.

Judge Rogers actively questioned that distinction during today’s testimony. “Apple did have to do something to the iPhone itself in terms of the technology of the iPhone in order for it to be sophisticated enough to play your software,” she said. “How is that any different than consoles — not so much about the payment piece, but about the development of the technology that allows your product to be played?”

This trial is about the entire App Store model, and as witnesses from Apple begin taking the stand, that will become more clear. Epic will grill them about Apple’s business practices and whether it’s delivering on its promise of a safe, secure experience for developers and iOS users. But Sweeney neatly laid out a more personal vision of the conflict: Fortnite is Epic’s answer to the web, and Apple wants 30 cents of every virtual dollar that an iPhone user spends in it.

The post Apple antitrust trial kicks off with Tim Sweeney’s metaverse dreams, appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Apple antitrust trial kicks off with Tim Sweeney’s metaverse dreams, Adi Robertson

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Epic Games launched its courtroom war against Apple in an extremely on-brand way: with CEO Tim Sweeney describing the metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash.

It’s “a real-time, computer-powered 3D entertainment and social medium in which real people would go into a 3D simulation together and have experiences of all sorts,” Sweeney explained to a courtroom partitioned by plastic barriers and a series of teleconferencing hotlines.

Sweeney called Fortnite ‘a phenomenon that transcends gaming’

The metaverse is Sweeney’s chosen metaphor for Fortnite, the battle royale game that Apple banned from its iOS App Store last year. Epic sued in retaliation, and today, both companies delivered opening statements before Judge Yvonne…

Continue reading…

The post Apple antitrust trial kicks off with Tim Sweeney’s metaverse dreams, Adi Robertson appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Inside the all-hands meeting that led to a third of Basecamp employees quitting,

I.

At 8AM PT on Friday, a bleary-eyed Basecamp CEO Jason Fried gathered his remote workforce together on Zoom to apologize. Four days earlier, he had thrown the company into turmoil by announcing that “societal and political discussions” would no longer be allowed on the company’s internal chat forums. In his blog post, Fried said the decision stemmed from the fact that “today’s social and political waters are especially choppy,” and that internal discussions of those issues was “not healthy” and “hasn’t served us well.” The public reaction had been furious, and Fried said he was sorry for the way the new policies had been rolled out — but not for the policies themselves.

Behind the scenes, Fried had been dealing with an employee reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaining a list of “funny” customer names, some of which were of Asian and African origin. The internal discussion over that list had been oriented primarily around making Basecamp feel more inclusive to its employees and customers. But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread. They also disbanded an internal committee of employees who had volunteered to work on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer — who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters — resigned.

Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people — more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees — had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest.

This account is based on interviews with six Basecamp employees who were present at the meeting, along with a partial transcript created by employees. Collectively, they describe a company whose attempt to tamp down on difficult conversations blew up in its face as employees rejected the notion that discussions of power and justice should remain off limits in the workplace. And they suggest that efforts to eliminate disruptions in the workplace by regulating internal speech may cause even more turmoil for a company in the long run.

“My honest sense of why everybody is leaving because they’re tired of Jason and David’s behavior — the suppression of voices, of any dissent,” one employee told me. “They really don’t care what employees have to say. If they don’t think it’s an issue, it’s not an issue. If they don’t experience it, then it’s not real. And this was the final straw for a lot of employees.”

II.

While Friday’s meeting would eventually grow heated, it began on a conciliatory note. Fried, who employees described as looking tired, began the meeting by apologizing for announcing the policy changes by a public blog post rather than first telling all employees. Hansson tuned into the meeting from bed, where he reported that he was feeling ill, and after making introductory remarks turned off his camera for the duration of the meeting.

Fried opened the floor for comments and questions. For the next two and a half hours, employees pressed the founders on the policy changes, the events leading up to them, and the state of the company. The first part of the meeting was devoted to discussing the events that had unfolded in the company’s internal Basecamp chat last month, in which an employee had cited the Anti-Defamation League’s “pyramid of hate” to argue that documents like the “funny” names list laid a foundation that contributes to racist violence and even genocide.

Roughly 90 minutes into the meeting, Singer raised his hand and spoke. One of Basecamp’s most senior executives, he had joined the company in 2003, when it was known as 37Signals and consisted of just four people. From his original role designing interfaces, Singer had risen to become head of strategy — essentially, Basecamp’s chief product officer.

Along the way, he had also alienated some of his coworkers by promoting conservative views. In 2016, three employees said, he praised right-wing website Breitbart’s coverage of the presidential election in an internal forum. (About a week before rolling out the policy changes, the founders deleted nearly two decades of internal conversations from previous instances of Basecamp and its other collaboration products. Among other things, this made it more difficult for employees I spoke with to accurately describe past interactions with Singer in the forums.)

In the April discussion about the list of customer names, Singer posted to say that attempting to link the list to genocide was “absurd.” On the Friday call, he went further.

“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”

He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”

Singer concluded his remarks. Fried responded, “Thank you, Ryan.”

A handful of other speakers followed. Then a Black employee asked if the company could revisit Singer’s remarks. (I’m withholding the employee’s name and other identifying details out of colleagues’ fears that they could be targeted for harassment for speaking out.)

“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn’t exist’ when it’s blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”

Fried went to move on, but other employees pressed him for more of a response from him and Hansson. At that point, employees said, Singer spoke up again.

“I can gladly respond,” he said. “I stand by what I said. Saying white people have something in common is racist. I stand by it … I am very sure I don’t treat people in a racist way.”

(Singer remembers one of these quotes differently: “I said that claiming anybody must have a certain viewpoint because of the color of their skin is racist,” he said today.)

The Black employee said they did not want to hear from Singer, but after some cross-talk, he finished his statement.

“The difficulty of this conversation is exactly why I raised it,” he said.

The Black employee responded: “You said, ‘white supremacy doesn’t exist.’ That’s a factual lie. It’s not true.”

To which Singer responded: “I said we have different ways of framing … If you want to debate whether it exists anywhere, then yeah. But not here at this company, not with the people I associate with.”

“It exists right now,” another employee said. “This is fucking bullshit. You are being ridiculous.”

“I don’t accept that framing,” Singer responded. “It’s not productive to argue further. I don’t want to argue. This difference in views, it is what makes a political discussion so difficult.”

Employees once again pressed Fried and Hansson for a response.

“I don’t like hearing that someone doesn’t feel valued,” Fried said. “I don’t know what to say … I can understand why [the employee] feels uncomfortable right now. I feel terrible about it. I don’t know how else to respond.”

The employee called for the founders to denounce white supremacy. “That would be the bare minimum for me,” they said.

“I’m not here to share my personal views on anything,” Fried said. “I’m horrified when one group dominates another.” Fried, who is Jewish, added that he had lost relatives during the Holocaust. “I think it’s absolutely the most disgusting thing in the world … I can’t say that’s happening here.”

Fried added that he didn’t “know what to say about specific terms. I don’t know how to satisfy that right now.”

Hansson remained on mute.

It was in that exchange that several employees decided to quit Basecamp, I’m told. Two employees told me that they had found themselves crying and screaming at the screen.

“This was the test, as far as I’m concerned,” one told me later. “Do you protect this extremely senior employee that you’ve protected for many years? And [the answer] was yes.”

Over the next hour, employees continued to come forward to discuss Basecamp’s new policies and what would be like going forward. But before the meeting ended, one employee spoke up to address Singer’s remarks directly in a way that Fried and Hansson did not.

“Racism [and] white supremacy are not things that are so convenient that they only happen when full intention is present, or true malice is present,” the employee said. “Evil is not required. We’re not so lucky as for this to come down to good and evil. It’s as simple as creating a space where people do not feel welcome.”

The employee continued: “The silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does. It creates that atmosphere that feels suffocating to people. It doesn’t require active malice. It’s not that convenient.”

The meeting broke up after no more employees had questions.

III.

A half hour after the meeting ended, Fried posted an internal note saying that Singer has been suspended pending an investigation. He added that the company was bringing in unspecified outside “help” to address the situation.

On Monday morning, in an interview, Fried told me that Singer had resigned.

I asked Fried to clarify his remarks during the Friday meeting, which had clearly caught him off guard.

“I denounce white supremacy unconditionally,” he told me.

Fried declined to answer my other questions on the record.

I also asked Singer about his remarks. Here is what he said, over email, in full:

“I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.

On the call, the view I gave was we all want a future where everyone is treated fairly. And yet there can be disagreement on whether defining our culture as ‘white supremacist’ helps us to get there. The subject is so charged that discussing such disagreements at work quickly leads to misunderstanding, heated accusations, and loss of faith.

Unfortunately, painful misunderstanding did result. Tensions were so high after the call that I decided it won’t be tenable to stay on the team. I gave my resignation over the weekend.”

IV.

This week was to have been Basecamp’s (virtual) biannual meetup, in which employees come together to bond over social activities while talking about the future of the company.

Those discussions will still take place, but amidst a backdrop in which some of the company’s most senior leadership has abruptly departed. More employees are likely to follow in the coming weeks as they find new jobs and make other arrangements, I’m told. In the meantime, no changes to the policies that Fried laid out last week are planned.

Fried and Hansson’s moves last week, and the discussion around them, revealed clear fault lines between executives and workers that go far beyond Basecamp. Founders at Coinbase, Basecamp, and other companies have sought to quash internal dissent that, in their view, distracts workers from the company mission and makes everyone miserable. To a manager, the exchange that led to Singer’s departure could lend credence to the idea that addressing social injustices on company Zoom calls is bound to be disastrous.

Meanwhile, employees at those companies have recoiled at what appear to be transparent efforts to prevent their workplaces from becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

No one I interviewed offered a confident prediction about how the past week’s events would affect Basecamp over the long term. On one hand, it’s clear that the five books Fried and Hansson wrote lecturing other people about good management made them a lot of enemies, at least on Twitter, where they have been criticized relentlessly. On the other hand, as one employee told me, it’s not clear that average Basecamp customers know or care much about Basecamp the company, and no one predicts a mass revolt of the user base.

But as much as the conversation about Basecamp’s moves has been framed as “politics,” it seems important to remember that the entire affair began when a third of the company — not all of whom are among the 20 who have departed so far, by the way — volunteered to help the company become more diverse and equitable. It was only when their committee dug a skeleton out of the company closet — that list of names — that Fried and Hansson moved to shut the whole thing down.

“It was actually a positive thing we were doing,” one employee told me, marveling at the chaos that had followed. “We had identified the problem, how it happened, and vowed not to do it again. It was a company doing exactly what it should do. The founders refused to lead, and so the company was doing it itself.”

Another employee said they had been thrown by the fact that the founders, after years of telling employees that they were part of an elite chosen few who were good enough to work at Basecamp, would get rid of them so easily.

“They just want to build cool shit all day,” the employee said. “They don’t want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.”

Correction: A previous version of the article misattributed two quotes. We regret the error.

This column was co-published with Platformer , a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

The post Inside the all-hands meeting that led to a third of Basecamp employees quitting, appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Inside the all-hands meeting that led to a third of Basecamp employees quitting, Casey Newton

The company’s senior leadership wanted to quell employees’ concerns, and only made things much, much worse

Continue reading…

The post Inside the all-hands meeting that led to a third of Basecamp employees quitting, Casey Newton appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Arrival and Uber are working on an electric ride-hailing car, Sean O’Kane

Images: Arrival

UK-based EV startup Arrival is working with Uber to develop an electric car that will be “purpose-built” for ride-hailing. Arrival plans to put the car into production in late 2023 and says it will not be exclusive to Uber. Instead, the startup says the goal is to create an affordable vehicle that would appeal to the millions of ride-hailing drivers around the world.

It’s another vote of confidence in Arrival, which just became a publicly traded company in March after merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Founded in 2015, Arrival is also developing electric delivery vans (with UPS as a customer) and buses. It also has backing from Hyundai and Kia.

Arrival and Uber released a handful of renderings of the new car’s…

Continue reading…

The post Arrival and Uber are working on an electric ride-hailing car, Sean O’Kane appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Dark matter could be destroying itself inside the bellies of exoplanets, ,

Large gaseous exoplanets could be filled with self-destructing dark matter. And now, a team of researchers has proposed using the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope to scan distant behemoths in the galaxy for potential heating effects that could arise from the mysterious substance, which outweighs regular matter by almost 6 to 1 in the universe.

Physicists know dark matter exists because it tugs gravitationally on stars and galaxies. But, so far, the invisible material has foiled every attempt to better understand its properties.

Many theories of dark matter propose that it is made of individual particles and that these particles can sometimes hit one another as well as regular matter particles, Juri Smirnov, an astroparticle physicist at The Ohio State University, told Live Science. According to these models, two dark matter particles might also smash together and annihilate each other, generating heat, he added.

Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

If those assumptions are true, dark matter particles should occasionally crash into large objects such as exoplanets, causing the particles to lose energy and accumulate inside those worlds. There, they could annihilate each other and produce a measurable heat signal that’s visible from far away, Smirnov said.

Along with his colleague Rebecca Leane, a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, Smirnov has suggested using the space-based Webb telescope, which will scan the skies in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to look for this characteristic heat signature.

Larger exoplanets would accumulate more dark matter, so the best candidates for such searches would be gas giants bigger than Jupiter, or brown dwarfs — enormous worlds that nearly became stars but failed to gather enough gas to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores, the researchers wrote in a paper published April 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Determining that the heat is coming from dark matter annihilation and not some other process would be tricky, so Smirnov and Leane propose looking for exoplanets that have been flung away from their parent star and are quite old, meaning they will have cooled to very low temperatures. If such an object were glowing abnormally bright in the infrared, it could indicate the presence of dark matter.

But an even more reliable method would be to search for large numbers of exoplanets throughout the Milky Way and make a map of their temperatures, Smirnov said. Dark matter is expected to pile up in the galactic center, so this map should show exoplanet temperatures rising slightly as you look closer to the Milky Way’s core.

No known astrophysical activity could account for such a signature. “If we see that, it has to be dark matter,” Smirnov said.

Capturing such a signal could help physicists determine the mass of dark matter particles and the rate at which they interact with regular matter. Since Webb, which is expected to be launched in October, will already be looking at exoplanets throughout the galaxy, Smirnov thinks the map of dark matter’s potential heat signature could be made within four to five years.

“It’s a neat idea,” Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer who studies exoplanets at Stanford University in California and was not involved in the work, told Live Science. Researchers have built enormous underground detectors on Earth to try capturing dark matter particles, but “there’s a limit to how big a detector you can build as a human being,” he added.

Related content

— The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

— What’s that? Your physics questions answered

— The 12 strangest objects in the universe

“We should take advantage of the big things nature provides,” Macintosh said.

His one quibble with the study was that Webb — which will do targeted, in-depth studies of relatively few objects — might not be the best telescope for the job. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which should launch in the mid-2020s, will map the entire sky in exquisite detail and might be better suited for this task, he added.

Originally published on Live Science.

The post Dark matter could be destroying itself inside the bellies of exoplanets, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.