'Sterile' neutrinos could be the source of a mysterious signal believed to be coming from dark matter in galaxy clusters.
Standard neutrinos are thought to be too light to be candidates for dark matter. But Kevork Abazajian of the University of California, Irvine, calculated how the hypothetical sterile neutrinos, which theories suggest could have larger masses than standard neutrinos, might decay to produce X-ray emissions such as those seen earlier this year by the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray space telescopes.
By factoring in the particles' interactions in the early Universe, Abazajian shows how sterile neutrinos could also be better than other dark-matter models for explaining how mass is distributed in the Milky Way.
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Heavy neutrino may be dark matter. Nature 509, 137 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/509137b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/509137b
