Scientists could potentially use Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) to spot dark matter via what are known as “time glitches.”

Although dark matter makes up 80 percent of the universe’s matter, it very rarely interacts with regular matter; however, researchers in Nevada and Ontario, Canada suggest that cracks in quantum fields that permeate the known universe could be behind such time glitches, according to New Scientist.

The network of GPS satellites stretches 50,000 kilometers and is moving with the rest of the solar system at 300 kilometers per second, so a time shift would take 170 seconds to move across the entire network. Scientists are hoping that the mass of an electron or an electromagnetic field could alter these cosmic “kinks.”

Scientists believe that dark matter may be organized as a gas-like collection of these kinks in the universe, or energy cracks, which the Earth sometimes passes through as it hurtles through space.

Andrei Derevianko from the University of Nevada in Reno has already been sifting through 15 years of GPS timing data, and will continue the search using highly sensitive ground-based atomic clocks that are under construction in Europe.

The idea is that when clocks become suddenly unsynchronized, scientists would be able to say that dark matter — a topological defect in the universe — had just passed by. The GPS constellation provides an opportunity to be the largest-ever human-built dark-matter detector.

The dark matter can cause clocks of the GPS system to go out of sync with a predictable pattern for about 3 minutes. If it only affects the clocks by a billionth of a second, scientists can detect it.

If the idea is correct, scientists would also be able to study dark matter with what are known as pulsars, which are the remains of dead stars that exploded into supernovae and beam electromagnetic radiation at Earth with very precise periods that can be predicted.

Pulsars create what are known as “star quakes,” which scientists believe could be due to dark matter. When one of these “cosmic kinks’ pass through a pulsar, it may alter the pulsar’s internal structure and result in a quake.

The journal Nature Physics published the report.

Dark matter, which should not be confused with dark energy or antimatter, is hypothesized in astronomy to explain gravitational effects that seem to be caused by some type of invisible mass. Telescopes cannot see dark matter directly as it does not emit or absorb light, or radiation. Instead, scientists can only observe dark matter based on its interaction with gravity.

Scientists believe that only 4.9 percent of the known universe is made up of ordinary matter. The rest is a combination of dark energy and dark matter, making understanding these phenomenon critical for scientists seeking to understand the universe as a whole.

Dark matter was first proposed as the cause of gravitational effects back in 1932 to account for strange orbital velocities of stars in the Milky Way, and later for “missing mass’ in orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters.