Physicists respond to dark matter 'discovery'

AFTER a decade fending off doubters, a team of physicists now insist they really have seen particles of dark matter in a detector here on Earth. It’s a stunning claim. Dark matter is thought to make up 90 per cent of the mass of the universe, but till now no one has ever seen it, let alone identified what it consists of. So what does the finding mean?

For over a decade, the DAMA (Dark Matter) collaboration in Italy has been looking for evidence of dark matter using a detector deep beneath Gran Sasso Mountain, where…