A new study supports the idea that gamma ray light detected at the center of our galaxy comes from dark matter, a mysterious substance that is believed to make up most of the universe.
Researchers created maps that showed the galactic center produces more gamma rays than can be explained with current knowledge of the region, a NASA news release reported. The excess emission could be a result of dark matter.
"The new maps allow us to analyze the excess and test whether more conventional explanations, such as the presence of undiscovered pulsars or cosmic-ray collisions on gas clouds, can account for it," Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab, and a lead author of the study, said in the news release. "The signal we find cannot be explained by currently proposed alternatives and is in close agreement with the predictions of very simple dark matter models."
Gamma rays are created in the galactic center from "binary systems and isolated pulsars to supernova remnants and particles colliding with interstellar gas," the news release reported. This region is also believed to contain the highest rate of dark matter.
The properties of dark matter are not well-known by scientists; Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) are possible explanations for the elusive matter. These particles could produce gamma rays; they "either mutually annihilate or produce an intermediate, quickly decaying particle when they collide," the news release reported. Either of these processes would end in the production of gamma ray light.
The leftover emissions are believed to be equivalent to between one and three billion electron volts (GeV).
"Dark matter in this mass range can be probed by direct detection and by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so if this is dark matter, we're already learning about its interactions from the lack of detection so far," co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT, said in the news release. "This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time."
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