Count all the objects in the galaxy and you will see how much light is being produced here. But this rule does not work for the Milky Way. Our galaxy has a source of extra gamma rays, the highest energy light, right at its center. And scientists do not know what this source is.
The excess of gamma rays has been known since 2009. Scientists using the Fermi wide-angle telescope, an orbiting instrument for detecting gamma rays, are constantly observing them.
Maybe the light comes from dark matter? Are aliens shining for us? Scientists have conducted simulations and now believe that light is produced by pulsars - the incredibly dense, rapidly rotating cores of ancient stars that "shoot out" beams of radiation.
To figure out where the gamma glow comes from, researchers needed to make more accurate models of unconfirmed parts of the galaxy. Scientists have listed 400 objects in the center of the galaxy that could be the cause of the anomaly, and then reduced the list to 66 candidate pulsars. They ran the updated information through a computer, and the source of the excess radiation was exposed.
"Our results indicate that this is a cluster of pulsars in a galactic bubble around the center of the galaxy," said study author Mattia di Mauro of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in the United States. "That explains the excess energy."
The researchers also tested whether dark matter could be causing the excess energy. But the new model showed that the mysterious substance, which accounts for 80% of the measured gravity in the universe, was not the source of the mysterious light.
"In our research … we found that if we use dark matter as an explanation for the origin of energy, the distribution of pulsar-like sources does not correspond to what actually exists in space."
