Astronomers at Stanford University in California have finally found evidence for the existence of elusive dark matter – something that was, until recently, considered just hypothetical. Dark matter accounts for approximately 27% of the mass and energy in the observable universe – and has remained invisible to scientists until now. The discovery was made by accident as astronomers examining a massive nearby galaxy found a strange distortion on its edge. The distortion, it turns out, was a smaller, invisible galaxy composed entirely of dark matter. Space.com reports: “We can find these invisible objects in the same way that you can see rain droplets on a window,” lead author Yashar Hezaveh said in a statement. Like raindrops, the massive clumps of matter warp objects seen through them. Hezaveh, an astronomer at Stanford University in California, worked with a team of scientists that used a massive radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, to find a clump of missing matter in the outer rim of a larger galaxy that. “You know they are there because they distort the image of the background objects,” Hezaveh said. Solving the crisis Observing objects in the distant universe can challenge the limits of current [...]