New simulations suggest dark matter could explain the mysterious gamma-ray glow at the Milky Way’s center. The findings show that the galaxy’s early mergers may have shaped dark matter in a way that matches NASA’s Fermi telescope observations.
A long-standing cosmic mystery is once again in the spotlight: what is producing the strange glow of gamma rays at the center of our galaxy?
A new study led by Dr. Moorits Muru, together with Dr. Noam Libeskind and Dr. Stefan Gottlöber from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), aims to shed light on this puzzle. The team collaborated with Professor Yehuda Hoffman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Racah Institute of Physics and Professor Joseph Silk of Oxford University.
Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, rely on state-of-the-art cosmological simulations to revisit an old question. The results point to dark matter—the invisible substance believed to make up most of the universe—as a leading explanation for the mysterious radiation first spotted by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Scientists have puzzled over this excess of high-energy light, known as the “Galactic Center Excess,” for years. It refers to an unusually strong concentration of gamma rays radiating from the Milky Way’s core. One popular idea suggested that dark matter particles might be colliding and destroying each other, releasing energy in the form of gamma rays.
As more data accumulated, however, the pattern of the radiation didn’t align perfectly with the expected distribution of dark matter in the galaxy. That discrepancy opened the door to a different possibility: the glow could be produced by a cluster of extremely old, rapidly rotating neutron stars called millisecond pulsars.
Reconstructing the Milky Way’s Turbulent Past
The team decided to take a new approach. Using a suite of high-resolution simulations known as Hestia, which model galaxies under conditions similar to our own cosmic neighborhood, they reconstructed how the Milky Way might have formed — including its early mergers and turbulent youth. These events, they found, could have reshaped the distribution of dark matter at the galaxy’s center.
Their results reveal a more complex, nonspherical dark matter structure than earlier models assumed — one that could reproduce the observed spread of gamma rays without invoking a large population of pulsars.
“The Milky Way’s history of collisions and growth leaves clear fingerprints on how dark matter is arranged at its core,” the researchers said. “When we account for that, the gamma-ray signal looks a lot more like something dark matter could explain.”
The findings don’t settle the debate, but they do restore dark matter’s status as a prime suspect in one of astrophysics’ intriguing mysteries. Future observations from instruments such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array, which will probe even higher-energy gamma rays, are expected to test these competing theories more decisively.
“This study gives us a fresh way to interpret one of the most intriguing signals in the sky,” the team added. “Either we’ll confirm that dark matter leaves an observable trace — or we’ll learn something entirely new about the Milky Way itself.”
Reference: “Fermi-LAT Galactic Center Excess Morphology of Dark Matter in Simulations of the Milky Way Galaxy” by Moorits Mihkel Muru, Joseph Silk, Noam I. Libeskind, Stefan Gottlöber and Yehuda Hoffman, 16 October 2025, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/g9qz-h8wd
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.
7 Comments
Dark matter is a fallacy. It is a math mistake. Go back and redo your calculations!
I realized that my statement sounded far too simplistic for Scitech Daily, so I asked chatGPT to rewrite my statement so it sounded more educated. Here you go:
—-
“The concept of dark matter constitutes a misinterpretation arising from degeneracies within our current cosmological parameterization. A re-examination of the underlying tensor-field dynamics and the associated metric perturbations may eliminate the apparent mass-energy discrepancy without invoking non-baryonic matter components.”
On top of that there’s probably a problem with observation and measurement, as well.
Even our finest instruments are still crude compared to what’s required. And they’ll probably never be fine enough.
We need improved observations/measurements of the galactic center gamma ray spectrum, both the energy and spatial distributions. The original DM prediction (a spherical spatial distribution) was at odds with existing data, so this cited study changes that to match existing data, nearly equivalent with predictions assuming the source is boring old millisecond pulsars.
Methinks is the yeti.
Dark matter that’s – glowing?
At this point the “dark matter” theory is really just a joke.
A missing link of perplexity ? me think that to observe is best but to make a ruling with little to no standard workable experiments that corroborate how darkmatter fits in to the universe makeup the universe can have several theories and we can offer a number of different conclusions that make any math fit . To explain dark matter and if it has energy would be to explain why there is space between planets , structures of matter then all the way down to the quantum . the glow of a gamma ray reflective translation the ray induces the highest radioactive exposure through time . time becomes more relative to space as distance is increased for a observation of time . maybe the ray is stanching over distance .