Physicists brawl over new dark matter claim | Science | AAAS

Physicists brawl over new dark matter claim | Science | AAAS

Same dark matter data — opposite conclusions A paper just published in Science claims to have falsified earlier hints of dark matter. But ‘not so fast’, says another group that has analysed the same data set — regions in the Milky Way mapped by a European Space Agency X-ray telescope. It is the latest chapter in a saga that started in 2014, when researchers saw X-ray emissions from other galaxies peaking at an energy of 3.5 kiloelectronvolts. Some attributed this to the decay of a novel elementary particle called a sterile neutrino, a candidate for the mysterious dark matter that appears to hold galaxies together. Science | 6 min readReference: Science paper