Milky Way Galaxy. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

(PhysOrg.com) — 95%. That is the percentage of the known Universe that is missing. As in it is not there. Or at least if it is there, we can’t see it. We call this unseen stuff “dark matter”. That has been well known for sometime. What is trickier in answering is why? Why is it that 95% of the universe is made up of this so-named “dark matter?” An even trickier question is where? As in where is this dark matter? It is those two questions that have plagued physicists for decades. Dark matter, by its own definition cannot be seen, hence its name. So how do we “see” it, how do we know “where” to look?
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Embedded in darkness (economist)

MOST of reality appears to be missing. Physicists reckon that the missing matter must be there, but that it is dark. Finding the stuff is damned tricky because dark matter, by definition, cannot be seen. So some of those physicists have been busy trying to devise ways of glimpsing it indirectly—and two groups of them now think their methods are ready to test.
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The Dark Matter Lab

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world’s deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings — a place uniquely suited to scientists’ quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.

Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.
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Dark matter ring. (Credit: Image courtesy of Andalucía Innova)

Here’s an article on the ever elusive dark matter. Science seems to be making some sort of headway on this stuff.

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009) — Dark matter is an enigmatic energy that makes up most of the mass in the Universe, whose nature has not yet been identified. Researchers have succeeded in estimating the percentage of dark matter in the Universe and describing the processes related to the very existence of this matter. But, until now, no one has established the distribution and behavior of the dark matter in a galaxy.

Now, astronomers in the Theoretical Physics and Cosmos Department of the University of Granada, led by Eduardo Battaner, in collaboration with researchers in the Applied Mathematics Department, have made great progress: establishing the distribution and behaviour of the dark matter in a galaxy.
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