Dark matter near the center of our galaxy is “flattened,” not round as previously thought, new simulations reveal. The discovery may point to the origin of a mysterious high-energy glow that has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade, although more research is needed to rule out other theories.
“When the Fermi space telescope pointed to the galactic center, it measured too many gamma rays,” Moorits Mihkel Muru, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany and the University of Tartu in Estonia, told Live Science via email. “Different theories compete to explain what could be producing that excess, but nobody has the definitive answer yet.”
Early on, scientists proposed that the glow might come from dark matter particles colliding and annihilating each other. However, the signal’s flattened shape didn’t match the spherical halos assumed in most dark matter models. That discrepancy led many scientists to favor an alternative explanation involving millisecond pulsars — ancient, fast-spinning neutron stars that emit gamma-rays.
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