A new dismal matter sensor underneath a good deal in Jeongseon , South Korea , is about to be turned on . The squad is attempting to govern out – or perhaps procreate – puzzling final result from a previous detector in Italy .

As far as astronomers studying the observable population can evidence , only around 5 percent of it is made up of affair . The rest , or the overwhelming absolute majority of it , is made up of moody matter ( around 27 percent ) and dark energy ( around 68 percent ) .

Dark matteris invisible matter that does n’t emit its own light and only interacts with normal affair through gravitational force , which we can see evidence for in galaxies andgalaxy cluster . But have that there is likely five times as much of it as unconstipated matter , scientists are of course on the Holman Hunt for direct evidence of its existence .

One approach to finding it , perchance counterintuitively as dark matter explicate what we see in the wizard and galaxies , is tohead underground .

" On world , " Hugh Lippincott , Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California , Santa Barbara , explained in a piece forThe Conversation , " we are constantly wall by modest , nondangerous levels of radioactivity coming from trace elements – primarily U and Th – in the surround , as well as cosmic rays from infinite . "

" The goal in hunting for dark matter is to build as sensitive a sensing element as possible , so it can see the dark thing , and to put it in as quiet a topographic point as possible , so the sorry matter signal can be see over the background radiation . "

There are several belowground facility around the world where physicistslook forsigns of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles ( WIMPs ) , among other thing , such as measure the impact of neutrinos . The idea is that the weakly interacting massive particle must be passing through Earth all the clip as it move through space , so to detect them we simply need detector sensitive enough to capture those imperfect interactions .

So far , fundamentally , no portion . But in1997 , one team in Italy – the DAMA / LIBRA experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory – reported baffle results . Their detector uses atomic number 11 - iodide lechatelierite , which grow diminutive flashes of light when a subatomic particleinteracts within a nucleusinside these crystallization . The team reported flare of brightness level , signs that they had been hit by subatomic mote . This is to be expected , with some background events observe above making their way of life to detector .

However , the number of event varied throughout the yr , which is what you would expect if some of the events were triggered by drear thing . This is because dry land move through theMilky Way ’s saturnine topic aureole more quickly during certain region of its orbit , increasing the number of detective work you would expect . As it moves more slowly through the anchor ring , you ’d ask detections to be blue too .

The results were controversial , particularly as other teams haveattempted and failedto replicate the result . But the team continued to see these detective work even as they upped their instrument ' sensitivity . muddy the waters still , as the sensitivity of the sensing element increased , it should have been able to detect lower free energy collisions . These would peak at different time of the year , but that was n’t seen in the datum .

Now , a squad in South Korea is attempting to replicate the DAMA / LIBRA experiment at a new facility dubbed Yemilab . The team ’s previous experiment – COSINE-100 – wasunable to replicate the resultsof the DAMA / LIBRA , despite using a interchangeable setup using the same Na - iodide lechatelierite .

“ The initial results cut up out a fair portion of the possible gloomy matter hunting region draw by the DAMA sign , " Hyun Su Lee , co - spokesperson for COSINE-100 said in a 2016statement . " In other dustup , there is slight elbow room left for this claim to be from the moody thing interaction unless the dark matter model is significantly modified . "

The young experiment – dubbed COSINE-200 – uses the same setup but with enhance sensibility and more " radiopure " sodium - iodide crystals . Overall , the project – which should be running from August – is also substantially shield than the DAMA / Libra the Scales experiment , hopefully diminish any setting disturbance that could have take place in previous experiments .

Hopefully , the information collect will tell us whether the previously claimed detection was down to error , other source ( always a possibility , just enquire the team who imagine they sawfaster than easy neutrinos ) , or something truly weird .