About a week ago at Symmetry Magazine, the in-house pub of FermiLab and Stanford’s SLAC laboratory, blogger Rhianna Wisniewski reported a preprint paper making the on line rounds via the arXiv early-publishing site. Other media have since perked up.

The news is cool, and utterly arcane. , triggering other media to perk up. The spectrum of the signal fits what some expect from collisions between dark matter and the ordinary kind. This, aside from indirect evidence such as excess mass in galaxies and the gravitational lensing effects of things we cannot see, would be the most immediate indication yet of dark matter’s effects.

Stories:

• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Hints of lightweight dark matter particle found in space ; Courtlands tells it with the background info I for one needed to make sense of this news, especially how the mass inference works.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Revealing the galaxy’s dark side . Excess of gamma rays at Milky Way’s center may indicate universe’s missing mass ;
• Wired News – Dave Mosher: Signs of Destroyed Dark Matter Found in Milky Way’s Core ;’
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Has Dark Matter Finally Been Seen? Time Will Tell ;

Grist for the Mill: arXiv paper “Dark Matter Annihilation in The Galactic Center...” ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.