Still in the dark about dark matter

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By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
December 2, 2011, 8:21 p.m.
Dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up about 80% of matter in the universe, has become even more inscrutable.

Scientists have been trying for decades to better understand and detect the nature of dark matter, which could help them figure out how galaxies first formed.

"We don't know much about dark matter," said Stefan Funk, a particle astrophysicist at Stanford University.

Unlike the visible matter in the universe, dark matter can't be seen and it's exceptionally hard to detect. It moves slowly, carries little energy and interacts very little with the stuff around it. But scientists do know that when a piece of dark matter is destroyed, the resulting burst includes a stream of high-energy particles.

These particles can be made of ordinary matter — protons, neutrons, electrons and their building blocks — and also of their antimatter counterparts. Antimatter was plentiful in the early universe, but it's now exceedingly rare and is created only by strange processes — such as, theoretically, the destruction of dark matter in space or in man-made particle accelerators.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-dark-matter-20111203,0,6163843.story