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Although technology has advanced since the first axion detectors went online in the 1980s, the challenge with most of them is that they test each mass possibility of dark matter one at a time, Kopec said.

“If dark matter were a QCD axion, it would essentially be invisible to us,” O’Hare told Salon in a video call.

The most likely dark matter candidate today is the axion, a lightweight particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.

Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, now argue that the axion could be discovered within seconds of the detection of gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion.

Yet, a single detection of gamma rays would pinpoint the mass of the axion, in particular the so-called QCD axion, over a huge range of theoretical masses, including mass ranges now being scoured in experiments on Earth.