One of the universe’s greatest mysteries, dark matter, which neither reflects nor absorbs light but is thought to hold galaxies together, may have finally given its “trace.”
A faint gamma-ray glow observed in the center of the Milky Way galaxy could be a sign of dark matter, according to a team led by Maurits Mourou of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope first detected the glow in 2008, but its source was previously unknown.
New supercomputer simulations show that the distribution of dark matter in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is oval, not spherical. That shape matches the strikingly recorded pattern of the beams by Fermi.
The final answer may be available by the end of this decade, when the new Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, which will be able to observe gamma rays much more clearly, becomes operational.
