For better or for worse, the first particles have finally been injected into the world's largest atom smasher. Scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, will be observing the behavior of the first proton particles injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier this month. Find out more in our full article after the jump.

The mysterious nature of dark matter has always been a point of contention for some scientists. However, a recent simulation using one of the world's most powerful supercomputers has created a mockup of dark matter clumps possibly existing in the inner regions of the Milky Way. Find out more about this dark matter puzzle in our full article after the jump.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has trained its sights on a rather puzzling astronomical discovery. Nine young, compact galaxies spanning only 5,000 light-years across were spotted recently. The weird thing about them was that they weigh as much as 200 billion times the mass of our own Sun. Find out more about this in our full article after the jump.

Dark matter on Earth? Scientists participating in the Dark Matter (DAMA) Project drew results that could be indicating the presence dark matter - results that mimicked those discovered five years ago. And guess what? The Italian scientists detected the activity 1.4 kilometers deep inside the mountain of Gran Sasso in Italy, where the DAMA observatory resides. Get more at the full story.

Space probe MESSENGER has gone through its Mercury fly-by and its trip yielded some surprising return photos. Scientists have observed some strange, dark halos in parts of the planet. The halos seem to be made of a glassy, black mineral which is still of an unknown composition. Photo and details over at the full article.

Scientists can be really odd sometimes. Previously, astronomers told us that dark matter doesn't exist; now cosmologists have found what may be the mother of all dark matter structures. Get the "big" picture in the full article, right after the jump.

Despite being under fire for some time now, the idea of dark matter holding the stars in a galaxy together is still the generally accepted one by the scientific community.

However, a team of astrophysicists has found a galaxy which exhibits no dark matter at all. The name of the galaxy is NGC 4736 and the find is currently puzzling astronomers. The full story can be found after the jump.

Dark matter, by definition, is a matter of unknown composition that doesn't reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed first hand. Scientists believe that such concept exists due to dark matter's gravitational effects on other visible objects. This is mostly true for the universe.

However, the concept of dark matter has been under fire recently with some researchers and scientists saying that it doesn't exist at all. Add now Canadian astronomers John Moffat and Joel Brownstein to that growing list of scientists who believe that dark matter is nothing but an unproven concept.

According to the two, the universe is not being held together by dark matter. Instead this can be explained by the Modified Gravity theory or MOG. Moffat explained:

MOG gravity is stronger if you go out from the center of the galaxy than it is in Newtonian gravity. The stronger gravity mimics what dark matter does. With dark matter, you take Einstein and Newtonian gravity and you shovel in more dark matter. If there's more matter, you get more gravity. Whereas for me, I say dark matter doesn't exist. It's the gravity that's changed.

On the other hand, one strong supporter of the dark matter theory Douglas Clowe stated that Moffat and Brownstein hasn't done anything yet for him to believe otherwise. "We're still open to modifying gravity to reduce the amount of dark matter, but we're pretty sure that you have to have most of the mass of the universe still in some form of dark matter," he added.

If you think that all the matter in the universe is made up of the stars, planets and other stuff within galaxies, you'd only be partly correct. Scientists now consider that most of the other matter in the known universe is hidden.

Around 75 years ago, astronomers noticed that all matter in the universe are innately endowed with gravitational forces. Measuring their gravity in relation with their mass, scientists were able to accurately calculate the specifics of heavenly bodies such as density, mass, gravity and size. This enabled them to predict how the sun and moon move, along with the motion of the planets. All was going well until they tried the same thing with stars.

As it turned out, various anomalies were noticed in the study of the gravity of stars. It was noticed that each one of them had hundreds of times the gravity that they should have with respect to their mass. Baffled, astronomers started looking for an explanation.

It was out of the question to assume that distant stars had more powerful gravity, lest they would draw in other bodies. The only other possible answer was that there was immense matter hiding unseen, and scientists theorize that it might actually make up 74 percent of all the matter in the cosmos.

Cosmologist Michael Turner calls this stuff "dark matter" and he says it's an extremely weird concept. Turner believes that most of the matter in the universe may be trickling in undetected fashion in forms never considered before by human science. These particles also wield a force called "dark energy" which acts as an anti-gravity force that repels galaxies, pushing them apart at very high speeds.

One theory is that dark matter comes in different forms. One of which are neutrinos that trickle off the sun. These, however, may only make up a small amount of the total dark matter in the cosmos. Scott Dodelson, an astrophysicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois says one thing's certain "until we actually discover particles, we're not home yet."

While a lot of people worry about their weight, Australian scientists have had more perplexing things in mind. In order to find out more about the known universe, they must find out how much the Milky Way weighs.

With the help of some theories and the 1.2-meter Schmidt Telescope, they were able to do the seemingly impossible. They just estimated the total amount of matter in our galaxy at 42 zeroes following the number three. Strangely enough, the number coincides with the answer to the same question in the sci-fi novel " Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.

They came up with the figure by measuring the escape velocities of each star possible. The escape velocity is the speed by which celestial bodies travel in order not to get drawn to the immense pull of other bodies. Once this was done, factoring in "dark matter" was the next scientific task.

Dark matter is a theoretical form of matter unseen and unconfirmed yet detectable by current means. Astronomers believe that like regular matter, this type of essence holds weight and must be factored in. Measuring the amount of dark matter characterized by their dark energy signatures, the final calculations were made.

The results were presented to an interested Australian Astronomical Society in Sydney. Also stated in the talk was the possibility of tracking the weight of the universe, though it would take considerably more effort because distant galaxies have to be studied more carefully.