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The end of the world wasn’t fire and brimstone—it was guild wars, mutated monsters, collapsing kingdoms, and rifts to realms that should never have been opened. Len and Rick fought through all of it. They watched Harmonia fall. They buried their friends.
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by Brian Scott Pauls
Five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a mystery to us. Now, we might have taken a step closer to figuring out what it is. Maybe.
On September 1, the team running the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment searching for dark matter reported a development at a conference in Tendo, Japan. Nearly a mile underground in an old South Dakota gold mine, the team watches a tank containing ten tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. Going through 220 days of data collected in 2023 and 2024, they found a flash of light—the signature of a xenon nucleus recoiling with 248 kiloelectronvolts of energy it picked up from a source no known background phenomenon explains. They calculated the significance of the event at 2.6 sigma—meaning the background would throw off an event like this roughly once in two hundred tries. That isn't enough to call the detection a "discovery," which typically requires five sigma or higher. They didn’t claim to have seen direct evidence of dark matter. But they saw something interesting.1
If LZ, or another experiment, repeats this finding, it could have major ramifications for astrophysics and cosmology. Dark matter out-masses all the rest of the matter in our universe at a ratio of about five to one,2 and yet we don’t know what it is.
In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky determined the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too fast for the cluster’s visible mass to hold them together. Something else—he called it dunkle Materie3—had to be supplying the necessary gravity. The astronomy community basically ignored his finding for 40 years.4 Then in 1970, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how fast the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy rotate and found the same problem—the edges were turning nearly as fast as the middle, which Newtonian gravity flatly forbids unless the galaxy’s mass is distributed in ways that don’t match what our instruments detect.5
Fast-forward to 2006, when a team led by Douglas Clowe mapped a pair of galaxy clusters caught mid-collision. The gas in the clusters—which is where nearly all the ordinary matter lives—had piled up in the middle, slowed by the impact. But gravitational lensing showed the center-of-mass to be separated from the center of the gas by a significance of eight sigma. They called their paper: “A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter.”6
The cosmic microwave background provides additional confirmation. The Planck satellite’s measurements fix cold dark matter at roughly five times the density of ordinary matter. Everything we can identify—gas, planets, nebulae, stars, galaxies, quasars, etc.—amounts to about a sixth of the material universe.7 Everything else is invisible and intangible, detectable to us only by its gravity.
So, what is it?
Maybe it’s not invisible, just really hard to see…
Before we dive into speculative explanations, let’s address the simplest possibility. Perhaps dark matter isn’t really exotic; it’s just faint—burnt-out stars, drifting planets, stray black holes. These are often called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Anything dense enough passing in front of a background star will briefly brighten it by gravitational lensing, so the idea is directly testable.8
The EROS-2 survey watched millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years. If the Milky Way’s halo were made of objects around four-tenths of a solar mass, roughly 39 lensing events should have shown up in the bright-star sample—only one did.9 The cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis independently cap the total amount of ordinary matter far below what the galaxies' gravity demands—no matter how faint that matter might be.10
Whatever holds the galaxies together, it isn’t made of the same stuff we are.
Science fiction is on the case. Three novels in particular—Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star, John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter, and Stephen Baxter’s Ring—each take a different approach to dramatizing the problem.
WIMPs to the rescue?
If dark matter isn’t just ordinary matter that’s hard to see, maybe it’s a particle no one has found yet.
The favorite candidates for decades have been “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs)—hypothesized to be heavy, stable particles produced in abundance in the early universe and left over when the cosmos thinned out.11 But we’ve hunted for a long time and nothing suitable has turned up.
LZ published its low-mass results last December, based on 417 live days—the largest dataset any dark matter detector has ever assembled—and found nothing between three and nine proton masses.12 Meanwhile ADMX is searching for another, much lighter, proposed particle called the “axion”, with no success to-date.13
Mike Brotherton is a working astronomer, as well as a science fiction writer, and knows his physics. His novel Spider Star, a WIMP story, includes a planet made of weakly interacting matter, and a starship drive that scoops and pushes WIMPs as fuel14—a fascinating premise, and possibly even realistic, but as of now, still hypothetical.
Maybe it’s a whole second world
We have no good reason to conclude only one type of particle comprises dark matter. Ordinary matter has a dozen fundamental particles, multiple forces, and a periodic table. Dark matter could have the same—dark electrons, dark electromagnetism, dark chemistry—coupled to us by gravity and almost nothing else.
The most elegant version is mirror matter, in which dark matter adheres to an exact copy of the Standard Model, with every particle getting a mirror twin.15 Earlier this year, theorists published predictions for electromagnetic signatures of mirror stars which have captured ordinary atoms.16
Mirror matter is the driving conceit behind John Gribbin’s The Alice Encounter. Gribbin, an astrophysicist by training and a popularizer by trade, builds his novel on “Alice matter.” This is "looking glass" stuff, much more plentiful than normal matter, arranged in a roughly spherical distribution around the flat disk of our galaxy. Beings composed of Alice matter, and more advanced than we are, have noticed the “contamination” of normal matter in the universe and have decided to investigate.17
Inside the Sun?
Whatever dark matter turns out to be, if it interacts with ordinary matter at all, some of it should end up in the cores of stars. Stars like our sun sweep up dark matter as they move through space, and a particle that scatters off a nucleus of normal matter along the way can lose enough speed to be stranded. Gravity does the rest, settling the captured particles into the core.18
In Stephen Baxter’s Ring, the fourth novel in his Xeelee series, the downloaded mind of a woman named Lieserl is lowered into the Sun and abandoned there for five million years. She finds the star inhabited by “photino birds.” These are dark matter creatures that colonize stellar cores, drain the energy that drives fusion, and age the stars prematurely into white dwarfs incapable of killing the photino birds in supernovae.19
The “photino” is the proposed supersymmetric partner of the photon, and in the 1980s it was among the leading candidates for cold dark matter.20
Maybe there is nothing there at all
The unfashionable possibility is that the discrepancy is real and the interpretation is wrong. Perhaps gravity behaves differently at very low accelerations, and no missing substance is required. Mordehai Milgrom’s Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposed in 1983, fits galactic rotation curves with a single new constant.21 MOND detractors point to the work on colliding galaxy clusters by Douglas Clowe and his colleagues mentioned above, but MOND’s advocates were still publishing rebuttals earlier this year.22
Stories waiting to be written…
Cold Company. If dark matter can lose energy, some of it may have settled into a thin disk lying in the plane of the galaxy, which the Sun crosses roughly every thirty million years.23 A geologist and a physicist argue for decades about whether the impact record is a coincidence or a timetable—and about which of them will have to be wrong in public.
The Long Fog. Due to something called the “neutrino fog,”24 dark matter detectors hit a wall no practical modifications can bypass. The answer lies permanently below the noise. A story about the last generation of experimentalists, what a scientific culture does when it proves a question unanswerable, and those who refuse to accept this limitation.
Alice’s Argument. An homage to Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves,25 further exploring one of that book’s most provocative premises. A laboratory converts a gram of ordinary matter into mirror matter, then converts it back. But it returns changed—edited. Someone made of mirror matter is sending us a message. First contact must be conducted a gram at a time, in a medium where no one can verify anything, and the negotiators on our side cannot agree on whether the other party is a government, a machine, or a child.
What comes next
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its ten-year survey of the southern sky this summer, and will map dark matter, in part, by the way it bends light across the visible universe.26 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 and is less than three months from its post at L2, where it will pursue a similar objective.s Underground, the LZ team keeps working, waiting to learn whether their recent detection is repeatable.
Maybe one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science won’t remain unsolved for long.
Thoughts on the nature of dark matter? Please comment below!
Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.
This month, I’m sharing my thoughts about T. R. Napper’s Aurealis Award-winning novel 36 Streets on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.
One of the more powerful passages in the first half of the book:
”We’re not meant to live easy. It runs against our nature. If peril doesn’t fall on us from without, then we find a way to bring it from within.”
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The LZ collaboration presented the result on September 1, 2026 at the TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Tendo, Japan; a paper has been posted as a preprint and submitted to Physical Review Letters. See Berkeley Lab, "LZ Sees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter" and Brown University's release, which carries spokesperson Rick Gaitskell's caution against overreading a single event. The 248 keV recoil energy, the 2.6-sigma significance, and the inferred particle mass — at least 200 GeV and probably nearer 1,000 GeV — are reported in Nature's news coverage. The analysis covers 220 live days taken between March 2023 and April 2024.
The frequently quoted figure is that dark matter accounts for roughly 85% of the mass in the universe; see the Berkeley Lab and Brown releases above. The ratio follows from the Planck parameters in note 7.
F. Zwicky, "Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln," Helvetica Physica Acta 6, 110–127 (1933). An English translation was republished as "Republication of: The redshift of extragalactic nebulae", General Relativity and Gravitation 41, 207–224 (2009).
Gianfranco Bertone and Dan Hooper, "History of dark matter", Reviews of Modern Physics 90, 045002 (2018), whose stated purpose is to replace the anecdotal version of this history — usually condensed to Zwicky in the 1930s and Rubin in the 1970s — with a fuller account. The neglect was real but not total: see Sidney van den Bergh, "The Early History of Dark Matter", PASP 111, 657 (1999), on the intervening work of Smith (1936), Babcock (1939), Oort (1940), and Kahn and Woltjer (1959).
V. C. Rubin and W. K. Ford Jr., "Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula from a Spectroscopic Survey of Emission Regions", Astrophysical Journal 159, 379 (1970).
D. Clowe, M. Bradač, A. H. Gonzalez, M. Markevitch, S. W. Randall, C. Jones, and D. Zaritsky, "A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter", Astrophysical Journal Letters 648, L109–L113 (2006), reporting the mass–baryon offset in cluster 1E 0657-558 at 8σ. The argument rests on the fact that the hot X-ray-emitting plasma between the galaxies, not the galaxies themselves, is the dominant baryonic component of a cluster — which is why separating the lensing mass from the gas separates mass from ordinary matter.
Planck Collaboration, "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters", Astronomy & Astrophysics 641, A6 (2020).
The method was proposed in B. Paczyński, "Gravitational microlensing by the galactic halo", Astrophysical Journal 304, 1 (1986), which argued that monitoring a few million stars in the Magellanic Clouds would either find dark halo objects or set strong limits on them. EROS-2, MACHO, and OGLE were all built on that proposal. The acronym MACHO — massive astrophysical compact halo objects — was coined by Kim Griest.
P. Tisserand et al. (EROS-2 Collaboration), "Limits on the Macho content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds", Astronomy & Astrophysics 469, 387–404 (2007). EROS-2 monitored 33 million stars over 6.7 years; in the bright-star subsample, one candidate event was found where roughly 39 would have been expected for a halo composed of 0.4 solar-mass objects.
The "Big-Bang Cosmology" review in the Particle Data Group's Review of Particle Physics (2025 update) sets out the concordance between the CMB and Big Bang nucleosynthesis in fixing the baryon density. The limit applies to baryons as such, which is why no population of dim or compact objects can close the gap.
The thermal relic calculation underlying the WIMP hypothesis is set out in G. Steigman and M. S. Turner, "Cosmological constraints on the properties of weakly interacting massive particles," Nuclear Physics B253, 375 (1985), and reviewed in G. Jungman, M. Kamionkowski, and K. Griest, "Supersymmetric dark matter", Physics Reports 267, 195 (1996).
LZ's low-mass results were announced December 8, 2025, based on 417 live days collected between March 2023 and April 2025. See Berkeley Lab, "LZ Sets a World's Best in the Hunt for Galactic Dark Matter". The boron-8 solar neutrino observation, via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, reached 4.5 sigma.
C. Goodman et al. (ADMX Collaboration), “ADMX Axion Dark Matter Bounds around 3.3 μeV with Dine-Fischler-Srednicki-Zhitnitsky Discovery Ability”, Physical Review Letters 134, 111002 (2025), excluding DFSZ axions between 3.27 and 3.34 μeV at 90% confidence. See also G. Carosi et al., “Search for Axion Dark Matter from 1.1 to 1.3 GHz with ADMX,” Physical Review Letters 135, 191001 (2025), listed on the ADMX publications page.
Mike Brotherton, Spider Star (Tor, 2008). Brotherton has written about the novel’s dark matter propulsion — a “beater” that pushes WIMPs — on his own site. Kirkus describes the Spider Star itself as an alien station with exotic dark matter at its heart.
R. Foot, "Mirror dark matter: Cosmology, galaxy structure and direct detection", International Journal of Modern Physics A 29, 1430013 (2014). Mirror matter remains a minority hypothesis, not a consensus position. Hidden-sector models of this kind generally posit multiple dark species and forces rather than a single particle, which is the basis for the claim above.
Franco Cabral, Stuart Williamson, David Curtin, and Christopher D. Matzner, "Generalized Predictions for the Electromagnetic Signatures of Mirror Stars" (2026), building on earlier work by Curtin and Setford. Captured ordinary matter accumulates as a "nugget" in the mirror star's core, drawing heat from the core and emitting distinctive X-ray and optical signals. That such predictions are being computed at all is the point: the hypothesis is falsifiable and people are trying.
John Gribbin, The Alice Encounter (PS Publishing, 2011). The description of Alice matter, Alice stars, and the aliens’ investigation of our disk follows the publisher's synopsis. The SF Encyclopedia entry on Gribbin places the book in the Double Planet sequence, set in the twenty-sixth century and turning on "the cosmological mystery of dark matter."
"Dark matter capture and annihilation in stars: Impact on the red giant branch tip", Astronomy & Astrophysics (2021). The predicted effects are subtle adjustments to stellar structure, not anything that would extinguish a star.
Stephen Baxter, Ring (HarperCollins, 1994), the fourth novel of the Xeelee sequence. Lieserl's discovery, the birds' helioforming of stars into white dwarfs, and the Xeelee's construction of the Ring as an escape route are the novel's central movements.
H. Goldberg, "Constraint on the photino mass from cosmology", Physical Review Letters 50, 1419 (1983), and J. R. Ellis, J. S. Hagelin, D. V. Nanopoulos, K. A. Olive, and M. Srednicki, "Supersymmetric relics from the big bang", Nuclear Physics B238, 453 (1984), which together established the photino as a viable relic dark matter candidate. Attention later shifted to the neutralino, of which the photino is one component.
M. Milgrom, "A modification of the Newtonian dynamics as a possible alternative to the hidden mass hypothesis", Astrophysical Journal 270, 365 (1983).
X. Hernandez, "A detailed MOND modelling of the Bullet Cluster" (2026) argues that the lensing offset does not rule out modified gravity, on the grounds that lensing depends on the density of the mass configuration and not only its quantity. The mainstream view remains that the Bullet Cluster strongly favors particle dark matter; the disagreement is worth knowing about, not resolving here.
The dark disk and its possible link to periodic cratering were proposed in Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece, "Dark Matter as a Trigger for Periodic Comet Impacts", Physical Review Letters 112, 161301 (2014); see also the APS Physics summary. The Sun's orbit around the galactic center takes roughly 250 million years, with a vertical oscillation carrying it through the midplane about every 32 million years. The dark disk remains speculative and has been constrained by subsequent surveys of stellar motions.
With LZ, the sensitivity of dark matter detectors has reached the point where they're now good enough to register neutrinos from the Sun's core. But these neutrinos scatter off xenon in a way nearly indistinguishable from the signal being sought—a background wall researchers call the "neutrino fog." See Berkeley Lab, "LZ Sets a World's Best in the Hunt for Galactic Dark Matter".
Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (Doubleday, 1972), winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972 and the Hugo in 1973. The novel's Electron Pump exchanges matter between our universe and a para-universe with different physical constants, leading to communication between the two universes.
Rubin Observatory was designed from the outset to map dark matter through the gravitational lensing of billions of distant galaxies: mass along the line of sight subtly distorts the observed shapes of background galaxies, and measuring that distortion across millions of them yields a three-dimensional map of where the mass sits. See Rubin Observatory, "Rubin Observatory Will Help Unravel Mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy", and "Dark Matter — in depth". The ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time began in late June 2026; see the Washington Post's account of the survey's start.
