Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 19 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1018
News
Bright light hints at a dark centre to the Galaxy
Mysterious matter may be colliding at the Milky Way's core.
Researchers are once again proposing that an orbiting telescope may have seen evidence for dark matter — the undetected material that is believed to permeate the Universe.
The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has captured flashes of high-energy γ-ray light that might come from dark matter, according to Lisa Goodenough of New York University in New York City and Dan Hooper at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
Because of the different energy estimates of the dark matter particle, the author makes the remark:
"That has led many physicists to conclude that dark matter rarely interacts with ordinary matter, except through the force of gravity."
I fear that the day will come when the dark matter is going to end up like the quark--undetectable in the laboratory and yet a real viable entity.
Before we go that route and because everybody and his brother has believed for the last 300 years that it is mass that mediates the gravitational force, let me make the pitch for my little secret that nobody wants to know or think about.
Among main sequence stars there is a high correlation between a star's mass and its luminosity. Any mass that has a temperature will give off radiation. Thus it is entirely possible that it is radiation rather than mass that mediates the gravitational force. I have five table top experiments demonstrating this plausible possibility and a theory to go with it here.
The bright light here does not hint but overtly betrays the stupendously high 'systolic' heart pressure of the throbbing galaxy. And this clear display of high-energy γ-ray flashes springs simply from the stepped-up nuclear activity under the backpressure of the galactic superwind (blowing out into intergalactic space from the overall galactic halo), akin to the solar wind.
Having increased as the inverse square of the galactic radius, the extreme central pressure and its effects are also now conveniently, yet childishly, attributed to a black hole monster feeding at the centre! For more, please see Nature 436, 227-229 (14 July 2005) and www.sittampalam.net/TheSuperwind.htm.
"Mysterious matter may be colliding at the Milky Way's core" thus becomes redundant and will no longer be even ethical for researchers to pursue. Instead, it is in the now-propounded final model (www.sittampalam.net/Synopsis.htm) that one would be "really shocked just how well a simple [non-]dark matter model accommodated this dataâ€; data now all too increasingly coming in and duly reported in mainstream journals.
Cheers! (It’s never too late in life for a Road-to-Damascus change in us for the betterment of science!)