The force might also be an entryway into understanding dark matter,
mysterious particles making up the bulk of the mass of the universe that have yet to be observed.
Not exact matches
We have no idea what's causing this gravity, though — we haven't directly detected the theorized
particles that
make up this
mysterious material that doesn't seem to interact (other than gravitationally) with normal matter like light and the
particles that we know and love, which is what
makes it invisible, and therefore «dark» to most instruments normally used to understand our universe.
The flash lamps that pump the initial energy into many lasers must be cooled for minutes or hours between shots,
making it hard to carry out research that relies on plenty of data, such as investigating whether, very occasionally, photons transform into
particles of the
mysterious dark matter thought to
make up much of the universe's mass.
That may sound obvious, but many physicists were hoping that photons —
particles of light — could help us to piece together the nature of the
mysterious stuff thought to
make up 85 per cent of the universe's matter.
They interpreted it as the debris left behind when
particles of dark matter — the
mysterious substance that
makes up most of the matter in the universe yet refuses to interact with ordinary matter except through gravity — crashed together and annihilated each other in the centre of the Milky Way.
Physicists interpreted it as the debris from
particles of
mysterious dark matter — thought to
make up most of the stuff in the universe — crashing together and annihilating each other.
Since this discovery 40 years ago, we have learned that this
mysterious substance, which is probably an exotic elementary
particle,
makes up about 85 percent of the mass in the Universe, leaving only 15 percent to be the ordinary stuff encountered in our everyday lives.
Many theories in
particle physics predict the existence of a so - called «sterile» neutrino, which would behave differently from the three known types and, if it exists, could provide a route to understanding the
mysterious dark matter that
makes up 25 percent of the universe.
Physicists at CERN hope that the detection and subsequent study of new
particles could provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions of the universe, such as why there is an abundance of matter and lack of antimatter, and the
make - up of
mysterious «dark matter,» which is believed to constitute over 84 percent of the matter in the cosmos.