Five Reasons We Think Dark Matter Exists

No other idea explains even two of these.

Image credit: NASA / CXC / ESO WFI / Magellan composite.

Any recent article about the remaining mysteries of the Universe will include dark matter close to the very top of the list of unsolved problems. What is it? Where is it? And if it’s there, how do we measure it? These are important questions still at the forefront of research in Cosmology. But this elusive substance that affects the motion of our galaxy and is the reason that galaxies exist with the properties they have, has only been detected indirectly, and has yet to be measured via direct detection. Earlier this year, the most sensitive dark matter experiment to date, LUX, released its results showing no direct evidence for dark matter and failing to confirm potential detections by two groups of experiments, DAMA/Libra and CoGeNT and Super-CDMS.

Despite this, fellow scientists are pushing forward, determined to measure direct evidence of dark matter. The U.S. Department Of Energy and National Science Foundation are on board with this plan, as they recently announced a new round of funding for 3 upcoming dark matter experiments: LZ (the successor to LUX), SuperCDMS-SNOLAB, and ADMX-Gen2. So if we haven’t measured dark matter directly yet, what is keeping researchers on the scent and funding agencies interested?