Gamma Rays from Galactic Center Dark Matter?
What is creating the gamma rays at the center of our Galaxy? Excitement is building that one answer is elusive dark matter . Over the past few years the orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been imaging our Galaxy's center in gamma-rays . Repeated detailed analyses indicate that the region surrounding the Galactic center seems too bright to be accounted by known gamma-ray sources . A raw image of the Galactic Center region in gamma-rays is shown above on the left, while the image on the right has all known sources subtracted -- leaving an unexpected excess. An exciting hypothetical model that seems to fit the excess involves a type of dark matter known as WIMPs , which may be colliding with themselves to create the detected gamma-rays. This hypothesis is controversial, however, and debate and more detailed investigations are ongoing. Finding the nature of dark matter is one of the great quests of modern science , as previously this unusual type of cosmologically pervasive matter has shown itself only through gravitation . Astrophysicists: Browse 750+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library