The Dark Horse in the Search for Dark Matter

Two years ago, China launched a space probe into orbit around Earth. Scientists nicknamed it Wukong, or Monkey King, after the hero of a 16th-century novel about a Buddhist monk’s long journey to India to secure religious texts. The probe’s job was to track and record cosmic rays, the streams of high-energy particles that constantly bombard Earth’s atmosphere from all corners of the universe.

In its first 530 days of operation, the probe recorded more than 2.8 billion cosmic rays. When scientists looked at data, they found something unusual. Some of the cosmic rays—at least 1.5 million of them—were recorded at a different and higher energy level than the others. Plotted on a chart, they appeared as a cluster of tiny outliers suspended above the curve.

Though they don’t look like much, this blip is