Nov 18, 2014 12:18 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The means of detecting dark matter may have been right in front of scientists' faces for years, as a new study finds Global Position Systems (GPS) can do just that.

Published in the journal Nature Physics, the new study comes from two University of Nevada - Reno (UNR) researchers named Andrei Derevianko and Maxim Pospelov. They believe they can detect the mysterious and omnipresent stuff that makes up so much of the universe using GPS satellites and atomic clock networks.

"Despite solid observational evidence for the existence of dark matter, its nature remains a mystery," Derevianko, a professor in UNR's College of Science, said in a press release. "Some research programs in particle physics assume that dark matter is composed of heavy-particle-like matter. This assumption may not hold true, and significant interest exists for alternatives.

"Modern physics and cosmology fail dramatically in that they can only explain 5 percent of mass and energy in the universe in the form of ordinary matter, but the rest is a mystery."

Past research has suggested the universe is some 27 percent dark matter, which is not visible and is extremely difficult to trace even with the heavily aided eye.

The study authors are collaborating with Derevianko's UNR College of Science colleague Geoff Blewitt, the director of the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory. The largest GPS data processing station in the world, Blewitt's lab interacts with 12,000 stations all over the world every hour of every day.

"We know the dark matter must be there, for example, because it is seen to bend light around galaxies, but we have no evidence as to what it might be made of," he said in the release. "If the dark matter were not there, the normal matter that we know about would not be sufficient to bend the light as much as it does. That's just one of the ways scientists know there is a massive amount of dark matter somewhere out there in the galaxy. One possibility is that the dark matter in this gas might not be made out of particles like normal matter, but of macroscopic imperfections in the fabric of space-time."

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