The hunt for dark matter lands in Singapore

[SINGAPORE] From people to planets, and garbage to galaxies, all ordinary matter makes up just 5 per cent of the universe. It would be as though all that you could see of Singapore is its central region – Bishan, Toa Payoh and Novena – and everything else is a mystery.

So what’s in the 95 per cent of the universe that we don’t know about? Scientists believe that under a third of it is made up of “dark matter” – an elusive form of matter that they are still searching for, as it could explain how the cosmos even came to be.

All of this may sound far removed from our everyday lives. But as I recently learned, the hunt for dark matter is happening right here in Singapore. In January, the city-state joined an international network called Gnome, short for the Global Network of Optical Magnetometers to search for Exotic physics.