A Dark Matter Breakthrough?

From the Wall Street Journal: A Dark Matter Breakthrough?

Beginning in the 1970s, evidence began to accumulate that there was much more mass out there than meets the eye. Scientists, mostly by observing the speed of rotation of our galaxy, estimated that there was perhaps 10 times as much dark matter as visible material.

At around the same time, independent computer calculations following the possible gravitational formation of galaxies supported this idea. The calculations suggested that only some new type of material that didn't interact as normal matter does could account for the structures we see.

Meanwhile, in the completely separate field of elementary particle physics, my colleagues and I had concluded that in order to understand what we see, it is quite likely that a host of new elementary particles may exist at a scale beyond what accelerators at the time could detect. This is one of the reasons there is such excitement about the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Last month, it finally began to produce collisions, and it might eventually directly produce these new particles.