Milky Way gamma-ray glow still leaves dark matter in contention
Using machine learning on more than a million simulated gamma-ray observations, researchers test whether the Galactic Center Excess—the Milky Way’s central gamma-ray glow—could come from self-annihilating dark matter or from many faint pulsars. They find pulsars would have to be far more numerous and dim than previously thought, making them hard to distinguish from a dark-matter signal, so dark matter remains a plausible but unproven explanation; the bright, crowded galactic center makes definitive conclusions difficult.
