Something emits a strange twinkle in the center of our home galaxy. Astronomers claim that more diffuse gamma rays are observed in this area than we can directly observe - and scientists have been trying for years to explain this phenomenon.
The glow inside the Galactic Center (the so-called Galactic Center GeV Excess, or GCE) has long excited the minds of astronomers. One theory argued that it arises from the destruction of dark matter. Later they began to say that millisecond pulsars were to blame, somehow eluding telescopes. Finally, new research reiterates that dark matter may be involved.
Astrophysicists Rebecca Lin and Tracy Slatier of MIT did their own calculations and found an error in their studies of hypothetical pulsars. This hypothesis was born 10 years ago when physicists drew attention to the excess of gamma radiation in the data collected by the Fermi gamma ray telescope. I had to remember again about the existence of mysterious dark matter. The fact is that until now physicists have never observed either itself, much less its decay. However, scientists are aware of the existence of a special type of dark matter particles - Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (or WIMPs). If they collided with each other at high speed, they would destroy each other, spawning many new particles - including gamma-ray photons.
Such a collision would generate an easily recognizable signal in which these photons would be evenly distributed. However, back in 2016 it became clear that in the Galactic Center, photons are distributed in clusters. Then they started talking about millisecond pulsars - neutron stars that make 1000 revolutions per second around their axis. Even these colossal energy sources are too weak to be detected individually at such a great distance, but their cluster would just create a diffuse glow.
So Slatyer and Lane mathematically modeled the Milky Way, adding a few pulsars and destroying dark matter. However, they found that even with dark matter as the source of some particles, the picture still does not match reality. So what does this mean?
Now scientists are confident that the 2016 methodology is simply not suitable for such calculations. They probably lack information. This is confirmed by other works on this topic, in which an excess of antiprotons, another potential decay product of dark matter, was discovered in the center of the galaxy. At present, the article has not yet been reviewed, which means that the theory of pulsars formally remains valid - but it is only a matter of time.
Vasily Makarov
