For all the discoveries we’re making of faraway galaxies, we’re still struggling to fully understand our own galaxy , the Milky Way. For example, researchers have known for decades of an odd concentration of gamma rays near the center of the Milky Way, although they weren’t sure where the high-energy light was coming from.

A new study proposes an entirely new perspective—that the light may actually be coming from neutron stars, as astronomers have suspected. If not, however, this could be the “first proof” of dark matter, according to the paper, published recently in Physical Review Letters . Given the evolution of the Milky Way, the researchers argue that the gamma ray excess most likely emerged from the collision of dark matter particles, the researchers claim.

The matter in que

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