Is it possible that humans have the capability to interact with Dark matter?

Question

Recently, scientists and physicists have been making breakthroughs in dark matter detection. I'm wondering if it's possible for humans to potentially be able to travel deep enough into space to be able to get to the place where dark matter is. I don't know if it exists in the solar system, a few million miles off from Earth, or if it's trillions of miles away in deep space. Is it possible that we could, sometime in the distant future, be able to collect/observe/interact with this little-known substance?

Answer 1

Dark matter is expected to be spread throughout the galaxy. From numerical ("N-body") simulations, the expected distribution of matter is the so-called NFW distribution, which is larger in the center of the galaxy and tapers out as you reach the edges.

Therefore, we do expect that there are dark matter particles in the solar system. It probably isn't very cost effective for us to send a probe across galactic distances where the dark matter density might be larger. So, probably the best hope for us to directly detect such particles would be to build a detector which interacts with dark matter in a lab on Earth, such as LUX-ZEPLIN. Another possibility is that maybe we can see evidence of a rare process of dark matter particles interacting with matter in the galactic center, where the density of dark matter and ordinary matter are larger; recently some astrophysicists have claimed that an excess of gamma rays from the galactic center could be explained by dark matter interactions (however this explanation is not universally accepted, and there are other possible explanations).

Of course, there are many unknowns related to dark matter, so there are important caveats. First, it is possible that dark matter is not a correct hypothesis, and some other theory like MOND explains the observations dark matter is meant to explain. Second, it could be that dark matter only interacts with other matter gravitationally, in which case efforts to detect interactions of individual dark matter particles with ordinary matter are doomed to fail (since the gravitational interaction is so weak). Third, dark matter could be something not "particle-like", such as an axion-like particle, which is best searched for in other ways.