Physicists revive hunt for dark matter in the heart of the Milky Way

Physicists revive hunt for dark matter in the heart of the Milky Way

4 years ago
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/physicists-revive-hunt-dark-matter-heart-milky-way

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has mapped the entire sky and found a faint, unexplained excess of gamma rays (inset) coming from around the center of our galaxy.

A controversial dark matter claim may be making a comeback. Three years ago, a team of particle astrophysicists appeared to nix the idea that a faint glow of gamma rays in the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy could be emanating from dark matter—the mysterious stuff whose gravity holds the galaxy together. But the conclusion that the gamma rays come instead from more ordinary sources, such as spinning neutron stars known as pulsars, may have been too hasty, the team reports in a new study. So the dark matter hypothesis may alive and well after all.