Dark Matter Gets a Reprieve in New Analysis

A strange glow coming from the Milky Way’s center was thought to be due to ordinary pulsars. But a new look at a years-old study shows that dark matter might still be responsible.NASA/JPL-Caltech

he galactic center shines too brightly, like the glow of a metropolis at night where maps show only a town. To mend their cosmic cartography, astrophysicists have spent years debating what could be powering this excess of energetic light. In 2015 the arguments appeared to swing decisively in favor of a somewhat prosaic explanation—that a large population of dim neutron stars was . But a new examination of that work, posted on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org earlier this month, revealed in those analyses. “There’s something happening in the, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper.