This month, Italian physicists will turn on an experiment hunting for a fifth, dark force of nature, the Guardian reports. You may be familiar with the hunt for dark matter. Measurements of the universe imply that there should be five to six times more mass than experiments can observe directly. Many scientists hope to find this missing mass. A new experiment seeks evidence for whether dark mass interacts with regular matter through some dark particle messenger.
“If we find this force it will completely change the paradigm we have now. It would open up a new world and help us to understand the particles and forces that compose the dark sector,” researcher Mauro Raggi from Sapienza University of Rome told the Guardian. Most (but not all) physicists believe that dark matter is a particle whose effects can only be observed through the force of gravity.
