One contender for the smallest thing in the universe is the singularity at the center of a black hole. (Shown here, an artist's drawing of a black hole pulling gas away from a companion star. 
 
 The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside. These too, seemed like fundamental particles, before scientists discovered that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each. 
 
 "This time we haven't been able to see any evidence at all that there's anything inside quarks," said physicist Andy Parker. "Have we reached the most fundamental layer of matter?" 
 
 And even if quarks and electrons are indivisible, Parker said, scientists don't know if they are the smallest bits of matter in existence, or if the universe contains objects that are even more minute. [Graphic: Nature's Tiniest Particles] 
 
 Parker, a professor of high-energy physics at England's Cambridge University, recently hosted a television special on the U.K.'s BBC Two channel called "Horizon: How Small is the Universe?" 
 
 Strings or points? 
 
 In experiments, teensy, tiny particles like quarks and electrons seem to act like single points of matter with no spatial distribution. But point-like objects complicate the laws of physics. Because you can get infinitely close to a point, the forces acting on it can become infinitely large, and scientists hate infinities. 
 
 An idea called superstring theory could solve this issue. The theory posits that all particles, instead of being point-like, are actually little loops of string. Nothing can get infinitely close to a loop of string, because it will always be slightly closer to one part than another. That "loophole" appears to solve some of these problems of infinities, making the idea appealing to physicists. Yet scientists still have no experimental evidence that string theory is correct. 
 
 Another way of solving the point problem is to say that space itself isn't continuous and smooth, but is actually made of discrete pixels, or grains, sometimes referred to as space-time foam. In that case, two particles wouldn't be able to come infinitely close to each other because they would always have to be separated by the minimum size of a grain of space. 
 
 A singularity 
 
 Another contender for the title of smallest thing in the universe is the singularity at the center of a black hole. Black holes are formed when matter is condensed in a small enough space that gravity takes over, causing the matter to pull inward and inward, ultimately condensing into a single point of infinite density. At least, according to the current laws of physics. 
 
 But most experts don't think black holes are really infinitely dense. They think this infinity is the product of an inherent conflict between two reigning theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — and that when a theory of quantum gravity can be formulated, the true nature of black holes will be revealed. 
 
 "My guess is that [black hole singularities] are quite a lot smaller than a quark, but I don't believe they're of infinite density," Parker told LiveScience. "Most likely they are maybe a million million times or even more than that smaller than the distances we've seen so far." 
 
 That would make singularities roughly the size of superstrings, if they exist. 
 
 The Planck length 
 
 Superstrings, singularities, and even grains of the universe could all turn out to be about the size of the "Planck length." [Tiny Grandeur: Stunning Photos of the Very Small] 
 
 A Planck length is 1.6 x 10^-35 meters (the number 16 preceded by 34 zeroes and a decimal point) — an incomprehensibly small scale that is implicated in various aspects of physics. 
 
 The Planck length is far and away too small for any instrument to measure, but beyond that, it is thought to represent the theoretical limit of the shortest measureable length. According to the uncertainty principle, no instrument should ever be able to measure anything smaller, because at that range, the universe is probabilistic and indeterminate. 
 
 This scale is also thought to be the demarcating line between general relativity and quantum mechanics. 
 
 "It corresponds to the distance where the gravitational field is so strong that it can start to do things like make black holes out of the energy of the field," Parker said. "At the Planck length we expect quantum gravity takes over." 
 
 Perhaps all of the universe's smallest things are roughly the size of the Planck length. 
 
 This story was provided by LiveScience, sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. ||||| The dark side of the universe is whispering, but scientists are still not sure what it is saying. 
 
 Samuel Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate particle physicist, said Wednesday that his $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station had found evidence of “new physical phenomena” that could represent dark matter, the mysterious stuff that serves as the gravitational foundation for galaxies and whose identification would rewrite some of the laws of physics. 
 
 The results, he said, confirmed previous reports that local interstellar space is crackling with an unexplained abundance of high energy particles, especially positrons, the antimatter version of the familiar electrons that comprise electricity and chemistry. They could be colliding particles of dark matter. Or they could be coming from previously undiscovered pulsars or other astronomical monsters, throwing off wild winds of radiation. 
 
 The tantalizing news is that even with the new data, physicists cannot tell yet which is the right answer, but they are encouraged that they soon might be able to. 
 
 “I don’t think it makes you believe it must be dark matter, nor do I think it makes you believe it cannot be,” said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University. 
 
 The good news is that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, as Dr. Ting’s instrument is called, is only two years into what could be a 20-year voyage on the space station, and is working brilliantly. “Over the coming months, A.M.S. will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin,” Dr. Ting told an audience of physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. 
 
 The report will be published in Physical Review Letters on Friday. 
 
 Astronomers and others from outside the collaboration responded enthusiastically. 
 
 “A.M.S. has confirmed with exquisite precision and to high energy one of the most exciting mysteries in astrophysics and particle physics,” said Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin and Stanford’s SLAC laboratory. 
 
 Maria Spiropulu, a Caltech particle physicist, said, “They have exquisitely small errors and they stop the plot at the cliffhanger, so we will be asking for more.” 
 
 Others, like Gregory Tarle of the University of Michigan, cautioned that uncertainties in the galactic background of radiation might make it impossible to ever get a clean answer to the source of the positrons. 
 
 Dark matter has teased and obsessed astronomers since the 1930s, when the Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky deduced that some invisible “missing mass” was required to supply the gravitational glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. 
 
 According to recent measurements by the Planck spacecraft, about 27 percent of the universe, by mass, is composed of some unknown form of matter unlike the atoms that make up us and everything we can see. Astronomers cannot see it, but they can detect its gravitational tug pulling the galaxies and stars around. 
 
 Figuring out what this stuff is is important for more than cosmology. The most favored candidates for its identity are as yet undiscovered particles known as WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles — left over from the Big Bang. Such particles could drift through the Earth like wind through a screen door. Impervious to almost everything except gravity, they would form a shadow universe clumping together into invisible clouds that then attract ordinary matter. Discovering one of them could give a lift to new theories of physics, like supersymmetry, which predicts of a whole new spectrum of so-called superpartners to the particles we already know about, not to mention explicating the nature of more than a quarter of creation. 
 
 But until now, the dark matter particles have mostly eluded direct detection in the laboratory or creation at the Large Hadron Collider. 
 
 The sky could be a different story. Such WIMPs floating in the halos around galaxies would occasionally collide and annihilate one another in tiny fireballs of radiation and lighter particles, the theorists Michael Turner of the University of Chicago and Frank Wilczek of M.I.T. suggested in 1990.
– The tiniest thing in the universe is not a grain of sand, as people once thought, nor a proton or neutron, or even a quark or electron—as small as they all are. In fact, experts today balk at naming any point-like object "the smallest" because of a theoretical conundrum: When you're infinitely near any point, the forces that act on it turn infinitely huge. Hoping to duck the whole "infinite" thing, scientists have invented novel theories around it, physicist Andy Parker tells Space.com. Among the work-arounds: Superstring theory, which posits that particles are like loopy strings rather than points. This would enable scientists to get infinitely close to something but always remain further from another part of it. "Space-time foam," the theory that space is made of pixels or grains. This would keeps particles from being infinitely close to each other, because the grain create a natural distance. One candidate for "smallest" that Parker discounts is black hole singularities, although he concedes that "they are maybe a million million times or even more than that smaller than the distances we've seen so far." See excerpts of Parker's BBC show on the subject.