Two of the darkest things in the universe may be making light - or at least, radiation. When jets spat out by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy collide with dark matter, they could produce gamma rays detectable from Earth - possible evidence of the elusive dark stuff.
Jets of particles are propelled away from black holes at near the speed of light. Akin to a cosmic belch, they are thought to be connected with matter falling into the black hole. Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues calculated how electrons in one of these jets would interact with any surrounding dark matter.
They looked specifically at the types of dark matter particles predicted by two major theories: one is supersymmetry, which proposes that each ordinary particle has a superpartner, and the other assumes that the universe is hiding a fourth spatial dimension.
They found that rather than simply ricocheting off one another, some of the electrons and dark matter particles could fuse together, transforming into a single, supersymmetric or extra-dimensional version of the electron. This particle would be heavy, and much of the electron's kinetic energy would be dumped into making the new particle. As a result, the particle would be almost standing still.
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