“Scientists may have ‘seen’ dark matter for the first time, thanks to NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. If so, this would mark the first direct detection of the universe’s most mysterious substance…

A team of researchers, led by Tomonori Totani from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, trained the Fermi spacecraft on the regions of the Milky Way where dark matter should congregate, namely at the center of our galaxy, and hunted for this telltale gamma-ray signature.

Well, Totani thinks we finally found that signature.

‘We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy,’ Totani said. ‘The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo.’

And this isn’t the only close match. The energy signature of these gamma-rays closely matches those predicted to emerge from the annihilation of colliding WIMPs, which are predicted to have a mass around 500 times that of a proton, the ordinary matter particles found at the heart of atoms. Totani suggests there aren’t any other astronomical phenomena that easily explain the gamma-rays observed by Fermi.”

From Space.com.