When most people gaze at the stars, they see beauty. Prof Yin-Zhe Ma sees puzzles — vast cosmic mysteries woven into the fabric of space and time. One of the most perplexing of these is the case of the Universe’s missing matter, and he’s made it his mission to find it.

“From the cosmic microwave background, we know that baryons — the building blocks of matter like protons and neutrons — make up about 4.8% of the universe’s total density,” explains Ma, an astrophysicist and full professor at Stellenbosch University. “But when we look around, we can only see 10% of those. The rest are diffuse, hidden in vast webs of gas between galaxies, nearly impossible to detect with traditional methods.”

This cosmic gas exists in a temperature sweet spot that makes it nearly invisible — too cool to emit detectable X-rays, too warm to form stars. But Ma, the recipient of the NSTF-South32 TW Kambule Researcher Award, has not been deterred: “My work is to develop new estimators that extract these invisible signals from vast datasets.”

His approach combines multiple astronomical surveys — galaxy surveys, gravitational lensing and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect—– to tease out incredibly weak signals from cosmic data. His breakthrough came when he realised that the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey had accumulated enough data to achieve detection when cross-correlated with Planck satellite observations.

“This tells us not just where matter is, but how galaxies form and evolve, and how energy flows through the cosmos,” he explains. “I stand at the ‘edge of discovery’ and always keep both theories and observations in mind to be the first to achieve detection if the data becomes mature.”

Ma’s fascination with the stars began as a child, but it was a fateful lecture at Nanjing University in 2003 by renowned Chinese cosmologist Prof Tan Lu that lit the spark: “He explained dark matter and neutrinos so simply, and I was hooked. I followed him to the bus stop after the talk, full of questions. His wife gave me their home phone number – she could tell I was serious. That night changed everything.”

Now based in South Africa, Ma is building the country’s reputation as a hub for computational astronomy: “Science isn’t mainstream here yet. People come for beautiful scenery, tasty wines, exotic animals — but not for astrophysics. That must change. Our future depends on building scientific capacity.”

He brings the universe down to earth for students and the public alike. “Nobody likes equations, dry concepts or rules, but everyone loves stories,” he says. “I ask them: Where does your gold ring come from? The answer? Neutron star collisions.”

His advice to young scientists? “Build a solid foundation in physics and mathematics. I don’t think they are separate work — they’re part of my life. Do you think my first language is Chinese? Absolutely not! My first language is equations.”

For Ma, the NSTF-South32 Award is more than personal recognition. “It’s a message that science matters in SA. We are not spectators – we are contributors to the global conversation.”

Read the special Mail & Guardian supplement about all the NSTF-South32 Award winners.