Physicists are remarkably frank: they don’t know what dark matter is made of.

“We’re all scratching our heads,” says physicist Reina Maruyama of Yale University.

“The gut feeling is that 80 percent of it is one thing, and 20 percent of it is something else,” says physicist Gray Rybka of the University of Washington. Why does he think this? It’s not because of science. “It’s a folk wisdom,” he says.

Peering through telescopes, researchers have found a deluge of evidence for dark matter. Galaxies, they’ve observed, rotate far faster than their visible mass allows. The established equations of gravity dictate that those galaxies should fall apart, like pieces of cake batter flinging off a spinning hand mixer. The prevailing thought is that some invisible material—dark matter—must be holding those galaxies together. Observations suggest that dark matter consists of diffuse material “sort of like a cotton ball,” says Maruyama, who co-leads a dark matter research collaboration called COSINE-100.

Jay Hyun Jo/DM-Ice/KIMS

Here on Earth, though, clues are scant. Given the speed that galaxies rotate, dark matter should make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, including on our provincial little home planet. But only one experiment, a detector in Italy named DAMA, has ever registered compelling evidence of the stuff on Earth. “There have been hints in other experiments, but DAMA is the only one with robust signals,” says Maruyama, who is unaffiliated with the experiment. For two decades, DAMA has consistently measured a varying signal that peaks in June and dips in December. The signal suggests that dark matter hits Earth at different rates corresponding to its location in its orbit, which matches theoretical predictions.

But the search has yielded few other promising signals. This year, several detectors reported null findings. XENON1T, a collaboration whose detector is located in the same Italian lab as DAMA, announced they hadn’t found anything this May. Panda-X, a China-based experiment, published in July that they also hadn’t found anything. Even DAMA’s results have been called into question: In December, Maruyama’s team published that their detector, a South-Korea based DAMA replica made of some 200 pounds of sodium iodide crystal, failed to reproduce its Italian predecessor’s results.

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These experiments are all designed to search for a specific dark matter candidate, a theorized class of particles known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, that should be about a million times heavier than an electron. WIMPs have dominated dark matter research for years, and Miguel Zumalacárregui is tired of them. About a decade ago, when Zumalacárregui was still a PhD student, WIMP researchers were already promising an imminent discovery. “They’re just coming back empty-handed,” says Zumalacárregui, now an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley.