Scientists want to build a billion tiny pendulums to find dark matter

Scientists have suggested building a network of a billion pendulums that could together finally find dark matter.

Despite the fact that dark matters makes up some 27 per cent of the universe – far more than the 5 per cent comprised of the ordinary matter that we can see – it remains almost entirely mysterious. Scientists know that it must exist because of its effects on the universe, but it can only be examined indirectly, and is invisible.

But the new research would aim to look for dark matter by looking at the way that its gravity interacts with normal matter. Rather than examining that on the grand scale of the cosmos, they hope to do so by looking for dark matter particles with the mass of a grain of salt.