Scientists suggest that X-rays from the Milky Way may offer evidence of the existence of dark matter.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed an X-ray “line,” or series of galactic X-rays, that hints at the existence of dark matter, according to Science News.
The findings, which were reported on arxiv.org, a server for research articles, hint at that the presence of dark matter, which scientists think makes up most of the matter in the universe.
“This is a very exciting thing,” said Nico Cappelluti, an astrophysicist at Yale University and the co-author of the new findings, according to Science News. “This is another measurement that sees the line in another direction.”
“This result is very exciting,” said Kevork Abazajian, a cosmologist at the University of California, Irvine, according to BBC News. “It makes it more likely that the line is due to dark matter.”
When American scientists examined the signal from this series of X-rays found in the Milky Way, they came across X-ray photons with a particular energy they think could have been generated by decaying dark matter particles, BBC reported.
Scientists have made countless efforts to identify dark matter particles over the years, but haven’t had much success.
Despite these new findings, scientists still say they don’t have concrete answers about what dark matter is.
Shunsaku Horiuchi, an astroparticle physicist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, suggests that maybe the X-ray line is not made up of dark matter, but something else, Science News noted.
“There’s definitely a lot of debate,” Horiuchi said, adding that the X-ray line “looks like it’s real, but then I don’t know if it’s dark matter or some atomic physics.”
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