After Decades of Searching, Are Physicists Closing In on Dark Matter?

No one knows what dark matter is made of, but scientists are confident it’s something that doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation, such as light.

Dark matter accounts for 85 percent of the mass of the universe, but no direct detections have turned up.

Scientists are now turning to a wider array of search strategies in an effort to crack the almost century-old mystery.

Dark matter may be made up of more than one kind of particle, with theorists suggesting the existence of an entire “dark sector” consisting of multiple kinds of dark matter particles.

Many other potential dark matter candidates have been put forward, from exotic particles known as axions to primordial black holes.

Axions are thought to be even lighter than WIMPs, and thus are just as elusive and difficult to detect.

For many astronomers and physicists, making sense of dark matter is the most urgent problem driving their research.

At the very least, solving the dark matter mystery would shed light on the fundamental physics of the universe, says Slatyer .

For now, physicists appear to be both excited by the precision of the latest experiments.