Physicists would love to find hint of dark matter to explain the piece of the creation we just have n’t been able to figure out . Dark matter would neatly explicate the strange demeanour of galaxies and strangely bent light in our universe . But a new report may have snuffed out black affair as a candidate for a secret at the midpoint of our galax .
thing get exciting when physicists come up unexplained bumps in their data that do n’t agree with their theories . One such bump , an excess of gamma rays shining from the center of the Milky Way , has conduct physicists to draft plenty of theories , some involving the problematic dark matter — a natural go - to for galactic things that the laws of physic ca n’t cleanly explicate . New research from an international team of physicist inculpate that whatever ’s causing the gamma rays could be a small less moody than they think .
“ We still know that non-white thing exists , ” bailiwick author Martin Pohl from the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany told Gizmodo . “ But we do n’t really have any sort of credible indication that we might have seen the signature of it other than through gravity . ”
Astronomers and physicist are hunting for the seed of the “ galactic center excess . ” An worldly concern - orbiting scope , the Fermi - Large Area Telescope , has detected a confusing expelling of da Gamma light beam from the extragalactic nebula ’s nub . Some have proposedthat dark matter would give procession to this discovered behaviour by releasing gamma rays during interactions with regular matter . As a reminder , matter makes up only about 4 percent of the hooey in the universe . Around 25 percent is dark matter , secret stuff and nonsense that only come out to interact with steady matter through its somberness but seems to shape the universe ’s moxie . The ease would be dark energy , the indiscernible source causing the universe ’s enlargement to accelerate .
Pohl and the other researchers on his team compared the datum to models they ’d get . These model take into account that genius seem to arrange themselves in anX - shapein the galactic center . They found that the gamma - ray excess could better be explain by these models than by models ask dark issue — dark matter would arrange itself in a sphere regardless of the shape of the astronomical center , agree to the paperpublished todayin Nature Astronomy .
The researchers do n’t know for certain what would do the overabundance , but perhaps it could be a kind of dense Vasco da Gamma - ray emitting neutron star , called a millisecond pulsar .
At least one other investigator harmonize that the new models seem to countermine dark issue as the culprit behind this gamma - ray whodunit . “ I believe it ’s not the terminal substantiation that dark matter is not there , but it ’s on a good track to do that for the first sentence , ” Francesca Calore , astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Annecy - lupus erythematosus - Vieux de Physique Théorique of The National Center for Scientific Research France , recite Gizmodo . She ( and others ) are working on standardised mould to discover astrophysical sources of this excess .
Others are n’t convinced yet . “ The correlation identified in this newspaper might be literal , but could every bit well be a bastardly feature film resulting from , for good example , the over - minus of some of the desktop guide , ” Dan Hooper , head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , tell Gizmodo in a Twitter direct message . In other words , Pohl and his squad might be messing something up in their moulding .
And even if these resolution did rule out the gamma - ray excess as a potential hint of non-white matter , there are spate of other puzzling things in space with potentially dark explanation . Those includerecent measurementsof aloof hydrogen , foreign excessesof antimatter , andtoo few high - energy electron .
The story is far from over . As we ’ve previously written , many physicist expend their time count for the things that are n’t there so the truth can come forth . Little by little , they habituate their data to chip away at a wearisome rock so the gems inside , the real discoveries , can emerge . And perchance dark matter is part of , but not all of the story , said Calore .
“ It ’s not a dim-witted plot , ” she said . “ Ruling out something is more complicated than saying something is there . ”
[ Nature Astronomy ]
AstronomyAstrophysicsDark mattergamma raysPhysicsScienceThe Milky Way
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