Some physicists have long suspected that the mysterious particles… “ghosts” in the world around us could be of great help in understanding the true nature of the Universe.

Now scientists believe they have found a way to prove their existence. Cern has approved an experiment designed to find evidence of them. The new tool scientists will have at their disposal will be able to detect these particles.

So what are these particles… “ghosts” and why was a new approach needed to detect them?

The current theory of particle physics is called the Standard Model. So, according to her, everything in the Universe is made up of a family of 17 particles—familiar particles like the electron and the Higgs boson—as well as the lesser-known but wonderfully named charm quark, tau neutrino, and gluon. Some of them are mixed in different combinations to form the larger ones.

But there’s a problem: astronomers have observed things in the heavens—the way galaxies move, for example—that strongly suggest that everything we can observe makes up just 5% of the Universe.

Some, or even all of the rest of the Universe, could be made up of “ghost” or “hidden” particles. Scientists believe they are “fantasy remnants” of the Standard Model’s 17 particles.

If they exist, they are really hard to detect because they very rarely interact with the world we know. However, the theory is that ghost particles can, very rarely, decay into Standard Standard particles, and these can be picked up by detectors.

Professor Mitesh Patel of Imperial College described the new approach as “brilliant”. “What I really like about the experiment is that these particles are right under our noses, but we’ve never been able to see them because of the way they interact, or rather the way they don’t interact.”

SHiP will be built within Cern’s existing facilities, according to Cern physicist Dr. Claudia Ahdida.

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions, as well as the elementary particles that make up matter.

Developed mainly in the 1970s, it is essentially a quantum field theory, based on quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests on the three interactions as described by the Standard Model agree with theoretical predictions. But it is not a complete theory of elementary interactions, mainly because it does not also describe the gravitational interaction.