Since dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter, even our most powerful telescopes cannot see it directly.<\/p>\n
However, scientists believe that this strange substance may be indirectly producing the baffling behaviour of our galaxy’s turbulent core.<\/p>\n
Lead author Dr Shyam Balaji, of King’s College London, says: ‘When we look at well\u2013known astrophysical events, like star explosions, they haven’t been able to provide a full explanation for mysteries like the specific energy and shape we’ve observed coming from the centre of the Milky Way.<\/p>\n
‘Now, we’ve shown how one excited dark matter model could account for at least two \u2013 possibly even three \u2013 of these kind of unexplained signals at once.’<\/p>\n
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Scientists have discovered the origin of three mysterious signals coming from the centre of the universe, showing that a mysterious substance called excited dark matter could be the explanation. Pictured: Predictions from the dark matter model (pink) compared to telescope observations (red crosses)<\/p>\n
The heart of the Milky Way is an exceptionally chaotic and violent place, where immense forces pull and crush clouds of dense gases into fast\u2013moving stars.<\/p>\n
At the very core is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which has a mass around four million times greater than that of the sun.<\/a><\/p>\n The intense gravity and heat release radiation that can be seen by telescopes out in space, but scientists haven’t been able to explain everything they’ve observed.<\/p>\n For example, scientists have found a sharp spike in gamma\u2013ray radiation at an extremely specific wavelength \u2013 known as the 511\u2013keV emission line.<\/p>\n This isn’t something that fits with our established picture of how normal matter functions, so scientists have had to look elsewhere for an explanation.<\/p>\n In a new paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists showed that these signals could have been caused by ‘excited dark matter’.<\/p>\n Dr Balaji told the Daily Mail: ‘Excited dark matter is a scenario where dark matter particles can briefly jump into a slightly higher\u2013energy state when they collide with each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n ‘When they fall back to their normal state, they release that extra energy by producing an electron and its antimatter partner, a positron.’<\/p>\n Scientists say that the galactic core might be filled with a substance called excited dark matter. This cannot be seen directly, but may be responsible for the strange energy signals seen by telescopes\u00a0<\/p>\n These positrons generate signals that can be picked up by deep\u2013space telescopes such as the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL mission, located outside the Earth’s radiation belts at an altitude of 37,000 miles (60,000 km).<\/p>\n The researchers looked at data from INTEGRAL and compared it to a model of how positrons might move through space.<\/p>\n This showed that collisions between the positrons produced by excited dark matter could lead to a spike in gamma\u2013ray radiation that matches the mysterious 511\u2013keV emission line.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the scientists didn’t stop there, as they soon found that their excited dark matter model could explain even more strange signals.<\/p>\n In particular, they found that the release of positrons could be the origin of a very high\u2013energy light coming from the centre of the galaxy, known as the 2 MeV gamma\u2013ray continuum.<\/p>\n Dr Balaji says: ‘The signal requires positrons with very specific energies of only a few million electron volts. Most conventional astrophysical sources, such as supernovae or cosmic rays, tend to produce\u00a0particles that are either much more energetic or distributed across the galaxy in the wrong way.<\/p>\n ‘The excited dark matter scenario naturally produces positrons in exactly this energy range.’<\/p>\n In addition, they suggest their model could potentially explain an unusually high level of ionisation in a clump of gas within a region called the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ).<\/a><\/p>\n Scientists also believe that excited dark matter could explain the strange ionisation of gases in a region near the galactic centre called the Central Molecular Zone (pictured)\u00a0<\/p>\n This crowded region, located 28,000 light\u2013years from Earth, is a vast reservoir of swirling matter and stars that contains almost 80 per cent of the galaxy’s dense gas.<\/p>\n However, sources such as cosmic rays \u2013 high\u2013energy particles ejected by complex processes in the inner galaxy \u2013 haven’t explained why this gas appears to be so heavily ionised.<\/p>\n The researchers now suggest that the answer could well be the strange behaviour of excited dark matter.<\/p>\n Co\u2013author Damon Cleaver, a PhD student at King’s College London, says: ‘If one mechanism could account for several long\u2013standing unexplained observations in space, it gives a much clearer direction for future research.<\/p>\n ‘Within the next generation of space missions, we may finally be able to test the theory of whether dark matter is behind some of the Milky Way’s most persistent mysteries and learn more about the mysterious substance itself in the process.’<\/p>\n![\"Scientists](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/106158527-15617131-There_might_be_black_hole_at_the_centre_of_our_galaxy_but_rather-a-10_17727139159.jpeg\")
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