The scientists at European Space Agency (ESA) on Saturday said that they have identified a strange spike in X-rays that are coming from two cosmic locations: Perseus Cluster and Andromeda Galaxy.
According to the ESA astronomers, the rare emissions could signify about dark matter. They say if their assumption gets confirmed, it would become the first direct evidence of dark matter.
The astronomers are very confident about the existence of dark matter but it is still a purely hypothetical thing.
If go by the estimates, as much as 80 percent of the universe is constituted of dark matter and exerts gravitational forces on its surroundings. But it’s about impossible to observe the dark matter as it neither emits nor absorbs light.
The study was conducted by the researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL) in Switzerland. According to them, they have fielded the signal of dark matter. The astronomers call the signal as “a weak and atypical photon emission” and hence cannot be associated with any known particle or matter.
Oleg Ruchayskiy, study researcher and an astronomy professor at Leiden University, said, “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges.”
Study researcher Alexey Boyarsky said, “Confirmation of this discovery may lead to construction of new telescopes specially designed for studying the signals from dark matter particles. We will know where to look in order to trace dark structures in space and will be able to reconstruct how the Universe has formed.”
The new findings were detailed online this week in Cornell’s open access library arXiv.
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