In Antoine de Saint Exupery's story The Little Prince, a fox reveals an important secret about the world: "What is essential is invisible to the eye". This same conviction is shared by astronomers, who for over half a century have believed that as much as 90 per cent of all the matter in the Universe is in an invisible form, which can be detected only by its gravitational influence on the luminous matter we can see, such as stars and galaxies. Yet what this dark matter is composed of and how it is distributed throughout space are still not known.
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机译：在安托万·圣艾修伯里（Antoine de Saint Exupery）的故事《小王子》中，狐狸揭示了一个关于世界的重要秘密：“本质上是肉眼看不见的”。天文学家也有同样的信念，半个多世纪以来，他们一直认为宇宙中多达90％的物质都是无形的，只有通过其对我们发光物质的引力影响才能检测到可以看到，例如恒星和星系。但是，仍然不清楚这种暗物质是由什么组成的以及如何在整个空间中分布。
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