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The Dark Universe

can a scientist battling long COVID unlock the mysteries of the cosmos by Alex Blasdol.

Last September, Catherine Hamins, one of the world's leading cosmologists,

was supposed to board a ferry for the northernmost island in the Orkney Archipelago.

The island, North Ronald C, is among the darkest inhabited places on Earth.

On a clear winter's night, it is easy to be awed by the thousands upon thousands of stars

visible to the naked eye, which spill their unpolluted light upon the Earth.

Hamins, who is the first woman appointed astronomer Royal for Scotland,

was planning to explain to the island's 60 or so residents that those stars,

and the rest of the perceptible universe, represent a mere fraction of the stuff that makes up our

cosmos. What she studies is everything we cannot see, the darkness.

Over the past two decades, Hamins, who is 45, has advanced our understanding of a vast

invisible cosmos that scientists are only beginning to comprehend.

That Dark Universe is thought to constitute more than 95% of everything that exists.

It is made up of entities more mysterious than the ordinary matter and energy,

the light, atoms, molecules, life forms, stars, galaxies,

that have been the subject of scientific inquiry throughout history.

In the past ten years, Hamins has learned that the Dark Universe shapes the visible cosmos

...