Double Teaming Dark Matter

The biggest challenge facing physics over the past quarter-century has been coming to grips with the nature of dark matter, and, later, dark energy. The math tells us those two make up about 96% of the matter in the universe, with everything we see in the night sky amounting to only 4$, yet physicists have no understanding of what dark matter actually is, let alone dark energy.

That may change relatively soon. The LHC, the largest atom smasher on Earth, is scheduled to go back online sometime in 2009, and will explore extremely high energy physics, likely producing particles never before seen. One or more of those particles may be the key to understanding dark matter. The second thrust in the effort should come sometime in the next decade, when the European Space Agency launches its Gaia probe. Gaia will map the positions of stars with unprecedented presicion, thus defining exactly where dark matter must be.

Combined, the huge particle collider that creates the unimaginably tiny and the little space probe that maps the cosmic may give humanity a completely new grasp of the universe.