Three recent studies raised hopes that physicists had caught the first glimpses of dark matter, but the somewhat contradictory results guarantee that researchers will be puzzling over the issue for some time to come. The latest results come from NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which was launched last June.
The evidence is a reported excess of high-energy electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which could be created as dark matter particles annihilate or decay [Nature News].
Peter Michelson, principal investigator for the instrument on Fermi that made the detection, cautions that his group is not yet claiming to have found a smoking gun for dark matter. The signal could also come from more mundane sources nearby, such as pulsars, the spinning remnants of supernovae. "But if it isn't pulsars, it is some new physics," says Michelson [Nature News].
The new findings are published in Physical Review Letters. Meanwhile, a ...
