The cosmic detective

Stellenbosch astrophysicist Prof Yin-Zhe Ma leads the hunt for the Universe's 'missing matter'

- Jamaine Krige

When most people gaze at the stars, they see beauty. Prof Yin-Zhe Ma sees puzzles — vast cosmic mysteries woven into the fabric of space and time.

One of the most perplexing of these is the case of the Universe's missing matter, and he's made it his mission to find it.

“From the cosmic microwave background, we know that baryons — the building blocks of matter like protons and neutrons — make up about 4.8% of the universe's total density,” explains Ma, an astrophysicist and full professor at Stellenbosch University. “But when we look around, we can only see 10% of those. The rest are diffuse, hidden in vast webs of gas between galaxies, nearly impossible to detect with traditional methods.”