Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

This post begins on a personal note. My Mum passed away, suddenly, last week.

Mum got me writing, encouraged me to write – and was an avid reader of what I wrote. Including this blog, where her favourites were my science posts. Mum taught me to wonder about everything – about the way our curiosity fuels our lives, and about the magic of a universe that unfolds for us, so wonderfully, before our thoughts and imagination.

I never did do a post for her on one of the most amazing ideas of modern physics. I was going to.

This post is for my Mum.

Gravitational lens attributed to the presence of Dark Matter. NASA, public domain.

There is something magic about dark matter.

There’s apparently a lot of it – far more, in fact, than everyday matter. Nobody’s seen it directly. It exists only as a gap in current theory. And yet it…