For the first time, physicists have confirmed that certain subatomic particles have mass and that they could account for a large proportion of matter in the universe, the so-called dark matter that astrophysicists know is there but that cannot be observed by conventional means. The finding concerns the behavior of neutrinos, ghost-like particles that travel at the speed of light. In the new experiment, physicists captured a muon neutrino in the process of transforming into a tau neutrino. Researchers had strongly believed that such transformations occur because they have been able to observe the disappearance of muon neutrinos in a variety of experiments. But the research announced Monday marks the first time that the appearance of a tau neutrino has been directly observed. Physicists from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva and the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics’ Gran Sasso National Laboratory were involved. ‘This is an important step for neutrino physics,’ CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said in a statement. ‘We’re all looking forward to unveiling the new physics this result presages.’ Astrophysicists have inferred the existence of dark matter from their observations that the total amount of visible matter is […]