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Everything Space: Astronomy and Space News“There are thought to be millions of these WIMPs going through our bodies every second,” Newburg adds. “Because they are weakly interacting, detectors designed to look for them might detect only a few a day. The reason we think these WIMPs exist is that we see the effects of some unknown and unseen mass pulling at the stars of the Milky Way through gravity. Though each WIMP is very small, there are so many of them that their mass accounts for 90% of the mass in our galaxy. It is quite extraordinary to me that we might live in a sea of these barely-detectable particles, and that we scientists see this as the most likely explanation for our observations of the heavens.”

“Because the Earth is much more dense than the Milky Way galaxy, the WIMPs have very little effect on the gravity we feel, and as far as we know our lives are not directly affected by the tiny particles.”