While you’ve been worrying about Iraq, Jayson (and Tony) Blair, Sammy Sosa, Martha Stewart and such, scientists – well, a few of them, anyway – have been studying “dark matter.”

When astronomers gaze out into the cosmos, they don’t see a lot of stuff they’re sure is out there. In fact, they have estimated that only about 3 percent of the universe can be seen with the naked eye. An additional 27 percent of the universe’s total mass is made up of dark matter, which may or may not be sterile neutrinos.

By my math, that leaves 70 percent of the universe unaccounted for, and scientists think that part is made up of dark energy and radiation. Scientists scattered around the globe have been pondering dark matter for years. Among them is Francisco Prada of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and some of his colleagues at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Not long ago, they reported on the results of their research at a meeting of other sky-watchers. Prada and his friends used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescopes to observe 250,000 galaxies, they said. They were looking for the way dark matter produces a gravitational effect on 3,000 satellites (natural, not man-made) that orbit these galaxies.

“Our results imply the presence of dark matter,” Prada announced.

Notice, please, the tentativeness of the conclusion. The verb “imply” is soft, gentle, not assertive. It allows room for error, for reinterpretation. It doesn’t smack folks upside the head. That’s the way good science should proceed. It’s also the way radio talk show hosts should proceed, though apparently no one has ever taught them that, so they barge right ahead with noisy declarative sentences that draw unwarranted conclusions the way picnics draw ants.

By the way, the Prada team’s conclusions about dark matter support widely accepted theories about the stuff but seem to contradict an alternative theory known as MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. The MOND theory, about which I understand nothing, apparently eliminates the need for dark matter to explain the unseeable mass in the universe.

I’m not sure why eliminating something you can’t see anyway is any great shakes, but that’s apparently what MOND does.

I will try to anticipate your other obvious question here by telling you that the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescopes are located at the Apache Point Observatory and that the Apache Point Observatory is – where else? – in Sunspot, N.M., which eventually may have to be renamed Skin Cancer, N.M., but we can wait.

The Sloan telescopes there are busy mapping one-fourth of the whole sky, figuring out the positions and brightness of about 100 million objects in space. Hey, speaking of Iraq, maybe those telescopes will find that space is where Saddam Hussein hid his weapons of mass destruction. Do you think?

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.