Lü Yongchang's murmurs rang out with striking clarity in the quiet laboratory.
"Dark matter?!"
The researchers standing beside him reacted with subtle changes in expression, some excited, others worried...
"Professor, why do you think this is dark matter?"
He Bilin's question came from beside him.
It was different from antimatter.
Antimatter was a substance humanity had actually observed, something whose existence was certain.
But dark matter...
Even now, with human civilization having become a level four civilization, it remained a theoretical existence.
As one of the Academy of Sciences' foremost astronomers, He Bilin naturally understood this mysterious stuff called dark matter.
First came the definition of dark matter.
It was an invisible substance that might exist in the universe.
It was also the main component of the universe's matter, yet it was not a constituent of the various celestial bodies within it.
According to various observations, dark matter accounted for an astonishing 85% of all matter in the universe, while making up 27% of its total mass-energy!
The various celestial bodies visible to the naked eye accounted for only about 5% of the universe's total mass-energy.
By that calculation, celestial bodies and dark matter combined accounted for only 32% of the universe's total mass-energy.
So what about the remaining 68%?
That was what was known as dark energy.
Compared with dark matter, dark energy was even more mysterious. It might even be the hidden force driving the universe's ever-accelerating expansion!
Although humanity had never directly found this so-called dark matter, there was ample evidence of its existence.
One example was the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy.
In an ordinary stellar system, the primary star's gravity meant that bodies closer to the star orbited faster, while those farther from it orbited more slowly.
But in the Milky Way Galaxy