Did you know we can only account for a tiny percentage of our universe – just 4% in fact? Scientists know this 4% consists of atoms, but what about the rest? Does ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ really fill the voids?

When Isaac Newton ‘discovered’ gravity, it was thought that all the mysteries of our universe were solved, until scientists in the 1970’s realised that the stars in our galaxy seemed to be unaffected by variable gravity. Princeton scientists Peebles and Ostriker concluded that ‘dark matter’ was the exception to Newton’s gravitational theory – a substance in the universe that had mass but did not interact with ordinary matter.

Meanwhile, another astrophysicist, Mordechai Milgrom, was trying to rewrite Newton’s laws of gravity. He called it Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and used it to show how gravity could be a little stronger than previously thought, across the huge distances that galaxies cover. His theories attracted a strong scientific following.

In the late 1990s another scientist, Saul Permutter, opened another can of worms. He noticed while looking at the expansion of the universe not only were all stars and galaxies moving away from each other, they were doing so at greater and greater speeds. Something had to be pushing the stars apart - an anti-gravity force which had never been discovered by science before called ‘dark energy’.

The Standard Model of the universe was based on these discoveries, and states that the universe is 4% ordinary matter (atoms), 21% dark matter and 75% dark energy. Although this model is generally accepted across the scientific community, it does have its skeptics too. Not everyone believes that such a huge and important set of theories can be based on so little physical evidence.

An epic intellectual battle has now ensued between dark matter believers and those who are unconvinced. Believers have created impressive computer simulations of the universe to show that dark matter and dark energy have been vital to the development of the Universe, and that without their influence the galaxies, stars, planets and even life itself would never have evolved. Cosmologists worldwide are on the trail of dark matter, searching deep space with satellites and plumbing the depths of mines.

In Most of Our Universe Is Missing we meet the scientists of the warring factions to get the story first hand. We visit the world’s most powerful telescopes, fly through outer space, tour a virtual ‘dark universe’ and travel to the Earth’s deepest mines to find out exactly what missing element is the backbone of the world as we know it.