New Hope for Milky Way Dark Matter

Gamma rays radiating from the heart of our Galaxy have an on-again, off-again relationship with dark matter. In 2009, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a surplus of gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way, which astronomers attributed to annihilations between dark matter particles. A few years later, the blame was placed on pulsars (see 4 February 2016 Synopsis). Now a new study by Rebecca Leane and Tracy Slatyer, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, shows that there was a problem with the pulsar analysis, and a contribution from dark matter could have gone unnoticed.