“A nearby galaxy once thought to be dominated by dark matter appears to have a surprising supermassive black hole at its center.” information New scientist.
However, scientists “are convinced that dark matter exists out there.” writes space.com. “Arguably the quest to detect it remains one of the most frustrating and challenging challenges in modern physics.”
And now they report that the centuries-old mystery of dark matter (the invisible glue believed 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 that suggest a faint glow at the center of the Milky Way could be the long-sought signature of dark matter. “It’s very difficult to prove, but it seems 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 center of the Milky Way It might not form a perfect sphere as scientists long thought. Instead, it appears flattened, almost egg-shaped, and that shape closely reflects the pattern of mysterious gamma rays observed by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope… Using powerful supercomputers, [the researchers] It 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 nucleus… matching the pattern of gamma-ray emission that Fermi has observed, the new study reports…
If the excess really arises from dark matter collisions, it would be the first indirect evidence that massive, weakly interacting particles [WIMPs]a leading candidate in dark matter, really exists…
“We have performed dozens of direct detection experiments around the world looking for WIMPS,” notes Phys.org, in an article titled “The empty search for dark matter“.
We have performed dozens of direct detection experiments around the world looking for WIMPS: dark matter particles in this particular mass range. And they are not all the same types of experiments. There are also scintillators, which use a giant vat of liquefied noble gas, like several tons of xenon. They wait for a dark matter particle to hit the xenon and cause it to twinkle, which is a fancy scientific word for “glow.” We see the shine; we detect dark matter…
They are just one example of a broader class of dark matter candidates, with charming names like Q-balls, WIMPzillas, and sterile neutrinos. We have tuned our different experiments to capture different mass ranges or interaction strengths to cover as much of that broad spectrum of dark matter as possible. We have even tried to make various types of dark matter in our experiments with particle colliders.
And we haven’t found anything.
