A team of astronomers is taking particular interest in a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way galaxy for what it may be able to show them about dark matter.
According to Discovery News, authors of a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters believe the galaxy is chock full of dark matter. It is emanating a large amount of gamma rays, piquing the astronomers' interest.
"Something in the direction of this dwarf galaxy is emitting gamma rays," study lead author Alex Geringer-Sameth, a postdoctoral physics research associate at Carnegie Mellon University, said in a press release. "There's no conventional reason this galaxy should be giving off gamma rays, so it's potentially a signal for dark matter."
Dubbed Reticulum 2, the dwarf galaxy was first spotted in the past few weeks as part of the team's Dark Energy Survey. Reticulum 2 is about 98,000 light years from Earth, making it relatively close.
"In the search for dark matter, gamma rays from a dwarf galaxy have long been considered a very strong signature," Savvas Koushiappas, an assistant professor of physics at Brown University, said in the release. "It seems like we may now be detecting such a thing for the first time."
Dark matter is widely believed to make up a majority of the known universe, but it is invisible. Searching for the source of dark matter has lead past scientists to weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPS). Mysterious in their own right, WIMPS are believed to have a destructive effect when they collide with one another, but they emit gamma rays in doing so.
"There did seem to be an excess of gamma rays, above what you would expect from normal background processes, coming from the direction of this galaxy," Geringer-Sameth said. "Given the way that we think we understand how gamma rays are generated in this region of the sky, it doesn't seem that those processes can explain this signal."
