Unveiling the Center of the Galaxy

We don’t know very much about the center of our galaxy, and small wonder—it’s blocked off by interstellar dust and about 27,000 light years away. (It also probably contains a supermassive black hole.) UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez has spent most of her professional career studying the Milky Way, and explains in very frank terms that we don’t really know very much about the center yet or why it functions the way it does (pay special attention to what she says about the mind-churningly bizarre presence of young stars near the black hole, which reinforces the point that the center of the galaxy is an incredibly weird place):

So when we can actually learn something new about the center of the Milky Way, it’s cause for celebration. And a detailed Fermilab analysis of gamma radiation points us towards the very strong probability that the center of our galaxy contains dark matter. If you’re familiar with the concept of dark matter, you know that this on its own doesn’t tell us much—the defining characteristic of dark matter is that we don’t know what the heck it is. But if the galactic center does indeed include dark matter, this could go a long way towards explaining why we’ve had such a difficult time figuring out what it’s made of.

Source: MU


Could This Be The Signal Of Dark Matter?

Sometimes a strange signal comes from the dark and it takes a while to figure out what that signal means. In this case, scientists analyzing high-energy gamma rays emanating from the galaxy's center found an unexplained source of emission that they say is "consistent with some forms of dark matter."

The data came courtesy of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and was analyzed by a group of independent scientists. They found that by removing all known sources of gamma rays, they were left with gamma-ray emissions that so far, they cannot explain. More observations will be needed to characterize these emissions, they cautioned.

Scientists aren't even sure what dark matter (which can only be detected through gravitational effects) is made of. One theoretical candidate could be something called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which could produce gamma rays in ranges that Fermi could detect.

Also, the location of the radiation at the galaxy's center is an interesting spot, since scientists believe that's where dark matter would lurk since the insofar invisible substance would be the base of normal structures like galaxies.

"The new maps allow us to analyze the excess and test whether more conventional explanations, such as the presence of undiscovered pulsars or cosmic-ray collisions on gas clouds, can account for it," stated Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab and lead author of the study.

"The signal we find cannot be explained by currently proposed alternatives and is in close agreement with the predictions of very simple dark matter models."

The scientists suggest that if WIMPs were destroying each other, this would be "a remarkable fit" for a dark matter signal. They again caution, though, that there could be other explanations for the phenomenon.

"Dark matter in this mass range can be probed by direct detection and by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so if this is dark matter, we're already learning about its interactions from the lack of detection so far," stated co-author Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time."

You can read more about the research in Physical Review D or in preprint form on Arxiv.

Source: NASA