Cosmologists say they’ve found the most compelling evidence of dark matter particles to date, deep inside the Milky Way’s core.
There, the thinking goes, the mysterious stuff is colliding to create cosmic rays more frequently than anywhere else in the celestial neighborhood.
Similar studies have peppered scientific journals in recent years, but establishing the source definitively has been troublesome. That’s not the case in this study, posted Oct. 13 on the preprint sever arXiv.org, says Dan Hooper, its lead author and a cosmologist at both Fermilab in Illinois and the University of Chicago.
“We’ve considered every astronomical source and nothing we know of, except dark matter, can account for the observations,” Hooper said. “No other explanation comes anywhere close.”