We know little about that sea. We do know that about 90% of the material in the Universe must consist of this invisible 'dark matter' in order for stars to swirl round in galactic islands, for galaxies to cluster together as they do, and for the Universe to look the way it does.

The mystery of the Universe's missing mass may be about to be revealed as UK astronomers fine tune their sensitive detectors situated 1100 metres beneath the North Yorkshire moors.

The Boulby Underground Laboratory for Dark Matter Research is situated in a working salt and potash mine in Boulby on the North Yorkshire coast. Here, UK scientists have installed their experiments to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles [WIMPs], a prime candidate for the missing mass of the Universe.

The laboratory has recently benefited from a 3.1 million pound Joint Infrastructure Award [JIF], providing enhanced underground laboratories and complementary surface facilities to create one of the world's foremost research centres for identifying and isolating the missing mass of the Universe.

Commenting on the new facility and its research programme Prof. Ian Halliday, Chief Executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council [PPARC], the UK's strategic science investment agency, said" This is an outstanding research facility equipped with some of the world's most sensitive dark matter detectors.

"It is a crucial addition to the UK's resources in a research field where British scientists are playing a world-leading role - the race by physicists around the globe to discover these exotic, as yet undetected, dark matter particles. It would be a major coup for UK science if we could win the race".

Although billions of WIMPs are probably passing through us every second, they hardly interact with ordinary matter and so are extremely difficult to detect. Occasionally though they do knock into the nuclei of atoms and the experiments at Boulby are designed to detect these rare collisions.

Prof. Neil Spooner of Sheffield University, one of the university groups involved, likens detecting the elusive WIMP to playing billiards with an invisible cue ball, "You don't actually see the WIMP, or cue ball itself, but you see the recoil of the billiard ball as it hits. If we are successful in our quest then we are looking at a place in the history books. This will be one of the great discoveries of our time".

Prof. Spooner and colleagues from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Imperial College and the University of Edinburgh currently employ three WIMP detectors using different materials.

In a sample of one kilogram of material, less than one WIMP a day will hit the nucleus of an atom, causing it to recoil slightly. The experiments will detect this recoil and record it.

However, because it happens so rarely, the detectors could also pick up lots of other reactions - such as cosmic rays hitting the material, or natural radiation - which is why the experiments are housed 1100 metres underground.

The Earth absorbs most of the extraneous particles like cosmic rays from space, whilst the walls of the salt mine, being very low in natural radiation, provide further protection from the rocks of the Earth's crust.

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