Dark matter is estimated to make up a vast majority of the universe's mass, yet no one has ever definitively detected it before. Now researchers from MIT are working to modify a particle accelerator to allow it to test select theories on what dark matter could actually be like. The work, described on Friday in Physical Review Letters, is primarily going to test if dark matter takes the form of a photon-like particle with one particularly notable difference: it has mass.

The experiment, known as DarkLight, would need another two years of testing followed by two years of data-gathering before it could produce any results, however. And it's far from the only experiment examining dark matter out there: physicists working at the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector are actually planning to announce the first results of their dark matter experiments on Wednesday. "It can have enormous consequences for our theories and our understanding," Milner says, were DarkLight to detect dark matter. "It would be absolutely groundbreaking in physics."