Could a Faint Glow in the Milky Way Be Dark Matter?

'A nearby galaxy once thought to be dominated by dark matter seems to have a surprise supermassive black hole at its centre,' reports New Scientist.

Yet scientists 'are convinced dark matter is out there,' writes Space.com. 'The quest to detect it arguably remains both one of the most frustrating and most exhilarating challenges in modern physics.'

And now they report that the century-old mystery of dark matter — the invisible glue thought to hold galaxies together — 'just got a modern clue.'

Scientists say they may be one step closer to confirming the existence of this elusive material, thanks to new simulations suggesting that a faint glow at the center of the Milky Way could be dark matter's long-sought signature. 'It's very hard to actually prove, but it does seem likely,' Moorits Muru of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, who led the new study, told Space.com...

The findings, show that dark matter near the Milky Way's center might not form a perfect sphere as scientists long thought. Instead, it appears flattened, almost egg-shaped, and that shape closely mirrors the pattern of mysterious gamma rays observed by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope... Using powerful supercomputers, [the researchers] recreated how the Milky Way formed, including billions of years of violent collisions and mergers with smaller galaxies. Those violent events, the researchers found, left deep 'fingerprints' on the way dark matter is distributed in the galactic core.... matching the pattern of gamma-ray emission Fermi has observed, the new study reports...

If the excess truly arises from dark matter collisions, it would mark the first indirect evidence that weakly interacting massive particles [WIMPs], a leading dark matter candidate, really exist...


'We have run dozens of direct detection experiments around the globe hunting for WIMPS,' notes
Phys.org, in an article titled 'The Empty Search for Dark Matter.'

We have run dozens of direct detection experiments around the globe hunting for WIMPS — dark matter particles in this particular mass range. And they're not all the same kind of experiments. There are also the scintillators, which use a giant vat of liquefied noble gas, like several tons of xenon. They wait for a dark matter particle to strike the xenon and cause it to scintillate, which is a fancy science word for 'sparkle.' We see the sparkle; we detect dark matter...

They're just one example of a broader class of dark matter candidates, with delightful names like Q-balls, WIMPzillas, and sterile neutrinos. We've tuned our different experiments to capture different mass ranges or interaction strengths to cover as much of that wide dark matter spectrum as possible. We've even tried to manufacture various kinds of dark matter in our particle collider experiments.

And we've found nothing.

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