Astronomers trying to “listen” to the dark matter

Researchers will try to detect the hypothetical elementary particles called axions through a new device

Imagine the vastness of the cosmos, where the total amount of matter only makes up less than 5% of the total mass. And this consists of all the galaxies, billions of stars, planets and all atomic & sub-atomic articles out there. The rest is made up of two mysterious substances called dark matter (25%) & dark energy (70%). The extent of our knowledge about both these phenomena is very limited — while the former is considered an invisible substance, the latter is presumed to be a force that repels gravity.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the Chameleon Theory — an alternative gravity model presented by the Physicists at Durham University, UK. The theory expects to take a stab at explaining the properties of the mysterious dark energy. It basically proposes that dark energy is not constant and should be treated as a variable in calculations.

More recently, the Physicists at Stockholm University have tried to decode the mystery behind dark matter. This is not the first attempt, however, to detect what constitutes this mysterious substance. In 2014, German scientists in Dresden, Germany concluded that the data from the HADES particle…