Scientists May Have Finally Detected a Hint of Dark Matter, the Mysterious, Invisible Stuff That Holds the Universe Together

A strange, invisible substance is thought to act as cosmic glue, holding the universe together. The stuff, called dark matter, makes up an estimated 85 percent of the universe’s matter. But scientists have never directly seen the mysterious material and are not sure about what it is.

Now, however, an underground instrument in South Dakota has recorded an odd event that may have been triggered by a dark matter particle. While the physicists involved say they are not claiming to have actually seen dark matter, the findings might represent a monumental step in finally observing and confirming the presence of dark matter. It “could be the first hint of a dark matter observation,” Sam Eriksen, a particle physicist at the University of Bristol in England, tells ’ Will Dunham.

Eriksen and colleagues announced their findings on September 1 at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The researchers also posted a non-peer-reviewed study on the preprint server arXiv, and they plan to submit it to the journal Physical Review Letters, according to a statement. Quick fact: The first clues about dark matter Scientists first suspected that dark matter existed nearly a century ago.

That’s because Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving so fast that they should have been slingshotted into space, but they somehow remained gravitationally stuck together. In the 1970s, American astronomer Vera Rubin advanced the idea after seeing individual galaxies rotate too fast to remain bound together without an invisible glue. Dark matter is invisible.

It doesn’t reflect, absorb or emit light. So how do scientists know it’s there? They can study the way it influences normal matter, the stuff we can see like planets, stars and people.

For example, when light passes by a large galaxy, the electromagnetic radiation bends way more than it should, given the galaxy’s detectable mass—hinting that some extra material is hiding within it. It simply remains unseen by the world’s current scientific instruments. One theory posits that dark matter consists of what are called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which rarely come into contact with the visible world.