Date:
Thursday, February 14, 2013
UC Irvine Professors Kevork Abazajian and Manoj Kaplinghat found the gamma-ray signal in data collected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. They tried to account for it from known objects, but dark matter was also consistent with the observations.
The case is far from closed, though. The center of the Milky Way is a violent place, and the sheer intensity of radiation there leaves any interpretation open to question. Abazajian and Kaplinghat continue to mine data from the Fermi telescope, attempting to confirm their interpretation. If they are right, they are seeing levels of reality that go even deeper than the mind-boggling discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider.