Dark matter could explain the mysterious gamma-ray glow at the Milky Way’s center. The findings show that the galaxy’s early mergers may have shaped dark matter in a way that matches NASA’s Fermi telescope observations.
A long-standing cosmic mystery is once again in the spotlight: what is producing the strange glow at the center of our galaxy?
A new study led by Dr. Moorits Muru, together with Dr. Noam Libeskind and Dr. Stefan Gottlöber from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam , aims to shed light on this puzzle. The team collaborated with Professor Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Racah Institute of Physics and Professor Joseph Silk of Oxford University.
Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, rely on state-of-the-art cosmological simulations to revisit an old question. The results point to dark matter—the invisible substance believed to make up most of the universe—as a leading explanation for the mysterious radiation first spotted by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Scientists have puzzled over this excess of high-energy light, known as the “Galactic Center Excess,” for years. It refers to an unusually strong concentration of gamma rays radiating from the Milky Way’s core. One popular idea suggested that dark matter particles might be colliding and destroying each other, releasing energy in the form of gamma rays.
As more data accumulated, however, the pattern of the radiation didn’t align perfectly with the expected distribution of dark matter in the galaxy. That discrepancy opened the door to a different possibility: the glow could be produced by a cluster of extremely old, rapidly rotating neutron stars called millisecond pulsars.
