Check your subscription status, update your details and more. We have arguably already discovered dark matter, says columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. To observe it, we will need to figure out whether we expect it to act like a particle or a wave.
Part of the Lux-Zeplin detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility A few years ago, I was working on a document that would be read by US policymakers, and we had some internal discussion about how to frame our goal. Should we say that we are hoping to discover dark matter? No, we ultimately concluded, because we had, in fact, already done that.
We have already discovered dark matter using multiple types of astrophysical observation, including the motions of stars in galaxies, which indicate the presence of an apparently invisible matter-like phenomenon that interacts through gravity and not noticeably through any other force. When we look at light from the dawn of time, when it flew freely through the universe, we can only match our observations with cosmological theories if we assume that dark matter exists. Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox.
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