system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Dark matter has mass and is effected by gravity. Does this mean that dark matter coalesces into planet and star-like masses?

If that is the case it blows my mind that there is matter like this in the universe and we have no way of directly observing it. Would a normal matter object fall straight through a planet-like mass made of dark matter?
gpt
It probably doesn't, based on searches for gravitational microlensing in the Milky Way caused by massive compact halo objects (MaCHOs). Experiments like OGLE have been running for almost 30 years now and have delivered a great amount of science - but haven't seen anything like enough microlensing events to explain dark matter through compact objects. The current best guess is that dark matter is composed of WIMPs instead of MaCHOs (that's Weakly Interacting Massive Particles - these are the real names, yes). The LHC has experiments trying to detect dark matter candidate particles, which may or may not exist.