The first results from a $2 billion instrument aboard the International Space Station have offered tentative support for the theory that exotic dark matter, invisible but abundant, permeates the universe.
The instrument, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), has not seen dark matter directly — by definition, the stuff is invisible — and results announced so far do not lend themselves to a slam-dunk conclusion that dark matter is a fact of the cosmos and not merely a theoretical construct.
But the 7.5-ton device, which rides a truss on the space station like a bell on a bicycle's handlebars, has detected hundreds of thousands of particles that have features suggesting they are debris from collisions of dark matter particles.