Телеграм канал «Futurism: Science & Technology News»

A team of astronomers say they may have detected dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up over 85 percent of all matter in the universe, for the first time in history. The claim is controversial, and the findings, published in a new study in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, will need to be borne out by further observations.⁠ ⁠ But at least until it gets picked apart by other physicists, it’s one of the most exciting developments in the hunt for this omnipresent specter haunting the cosmos.⁠ ⁠ In their study, the team analyzed fifteen years worth of data that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope took in an overlooked region near the center of the Milky Way, and found a halo of gamma rays that couldn’t be explained by its surroundings. “The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo," Totani said in a statement.⁠ ⁠ The intensity of the emissions, the astronomers found, matches the emissions predicted from the annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles, suggesting that the particles have a mass around 500 times that of a proton. “It turns out that dark matter is a new particle not included in the current standard model of particle physics,” Totani added