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Now you see it, now you don’t. Physicists first thought they’d seen dark matter in 1999, but now another group’s failure to find anything similar has left them wondering.

Astronomers have known for years that the universe is filled with mysterious dark matter. They can see its gravitational effects and calculate that it must account for up to 90 per cent of the matter in the universe. Researchers from the Dark Matter (DAMA) project at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy claimed in 1999 to have caught a few particles of dark matter.

But nobody has been able to…

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