Two years ago, China launched a space probe into orbit around Earth that was supposed to track and record cosmic rays. During the first 530 days of operation, the probe recorded more than 2.8 billion cosmic rays, but at least 1.5 million of those rays were recorded at a different and a higher energy level than the other. On a chart, they appear as a cluster of tiny outliers suspended above the curve. This is an incredibly important blip and might help solve one of the biggest mysteries in science: the existence of dark matter. Since we can’t see dark matter, we don’t know what it is made of or how much there is. But China’s space probe, named Wukong, known formally as the Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE), is designed to detect the signal that comes from weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which is what scientists suspect make up dark matter. For China, DAMPE is the country’s first mission dedicated exclusively to astronomy and astrophysics and has already returned a promising result in just two years. This success makes China a fierce participant — or competitor — in the field.
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