Astronomers have detected a mysterious signal in tenner - ray information from a written report of galaxy clump , and they call back the XTC - rays could have been produced by the decay of uninspired neutrino , a type of speck propose as a candidate for dark matter .
Dark matter make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe , though it does n’t emit or take up Light Within like proton , neutrons , and negatron – the “ normal ” matter that make up the major planet and stars . That ’s why scientist use indirect methods to search for unseeable dark matter clues ; its gravitational influence on the movement and appearance of objects like wandflower can be detected .
The mysterious tenner - ray signal was revealed in a new study of the Perseus wandflower cluster usingNASA ’s Chandra X - ray Observatoryand 73 clusters withESA ’s XMM - Newton . Perseus is one of the most monumental objects in the universe , stop thousand of galaxy in a cloud of superheated H gun . At over 10 million degrees Celsius , that gas is hot enough to emit ex - rays . Theimage of Perseusabove commingle 17 days ’ worth of information taken over a decade .
The newfangled finding dwell of an unidentified X - beam of light emission line : a spike in vividness at a very specific wavelength of X - ray of light light . In this case , it was concentrate on about 3.56 kiloelectron volt ( keV ) . The emission line could be a theme song from the disintegration of these hypothetical uninventive neutrino , which are prefigure to interact with normal affair only via gravity .
" If this foreign signaling had been due to a known constituent present in the gas , it should have left other signal in the X - irradiation light at other well - known wavelength , but none of these were recorded,“Esra Bulbul of the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicssays in anESA word release .
She add in aNASA liberation : “ We know that the dark matter explanation is a foresightful shot , but the pay - off would be huge if we ’re right . ” However dubiousness abound : The detection of the emission line press the sensitivity capabilities of both observatories , and it ’s possible that normal affair in the bunch could have produced the emission line .
Theworkis described inThe Astrophysical Journalthis month , although Bulbul ’s team posted apreprinton arXiv , the publicly accessible database . A week after it appear on the online forum , a squad led byAlexey Boyarsky of Leiden Universityin the Netherlands send apaperthere reporting grounds for an emission telephone line at the same vigour in XMM - Newton observations of the extragalactic nebula M31 and the outskirt of the Perseus cluster – tone the evidence that the emission line is actual .
Their next step is to combine datum from Chandra withJAXA ’s Suzakuto see if they can come up the same X - ray signal . Here ’s adifferent view of Perseus , combining data from Chandra in the inner regions of the clump and XMM datum in the outer region .
image : X - ray : NASA / CXC / SAO / E.Bulbul , et al . ( top )
