{"id":230687,"date":"2026-02-06T05:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T11:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/into-the-neutrino-fog-the-ghosts-haunting-our-search-for-dark-matter"},"modified":"2026-02-06T05:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T11:26:11","slug":"into-the-neutrino-fog-the-ghosts-haunting-our-search-for-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/into-the-neutrino-fog-the-ghosts-haunting-our-search-for-dark-matter","title":{"rendered":"Into the neutrino fog: The ghosts haunting our search for dark matter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/into-the-neutrino-fog-the-ghosts-haunting-our-search-for-dark-matter.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ciaran O\u2019Hare scribbles symbols using colored markers across his whiteboard like he\u2019s trying to solve a crime\u2014or perhaps planning one. He bounces around the edges of the board, slowly filling it with sharp angles and curling letters. I watch on, and when he senses I\u2019m losing track, he pauses intermittently, allowing my brain to catch up. Ciaran speaks with an easy to understand British inflection, but the language on the whiteboard might as well be hieroglyphics.<\/p>\n<p>Ciaran\u2019s whiteboard doesn\u2019t lay out a crime, but a mystery in the language of physics. In plain language, the mystery goes like this: everything we can see\u2014with our eyes or elaborate telescopes\u2014makes up only around 5% of the matter in our universe. There\u2019s an invisible <i>something<\/i> out there that seems to bind the fabric of spacetime together. We don\u2019t know what it is, but we know it\u2019s there because of the force it exerts on the things we can see such as gigantic galaxies. The \u201c<i>something<\/i>\u201d is a phantom presence that touches our reality.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists call it dark matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ciaran O\u2019Hare scribbles symbols using colored markers across his whiteboard like he\u2019s trying to solve a crime\u2014or perhaps planning one. He bounces around the edges of the board, slowly filling it with sharp angles and curling letters. I watch on, and when he senses I\u2019m losing track, he pauses intermittently, allowing my brain to catch [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,47,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-neuroscience","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}