The Missing Universe The mystery of dark matter may at last have been solved

摘要

THE UNIVERSE IS A LOT OF THINGS, BUT EASY TO understand isn't one of them. Take the fact that more than 80% of its mass is missing. Galaxies spin so fast, they would fly apart if the gravity of some unseen mass weren't keeping them intact, surrounding them like a glass paperweight encasing a hutterfly. Cosmologists have been trying to identify this so-called dark matter since the 1930s, and now they may have succeeded thanks to new data from a spectrometer aboard the International Space Station.