Scientific American: In April, Christoph Weniger of the GRAPPA Institute in Amsterdam examined public data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s primary instrument: the Large Area Telescope (LAT). He found evidence of a high-energy gamma-ray signal emanating from the galactic center. No known astronomical phenomenon could account for the signal and Weniger believed it could only have been caused by dark matter particle collisions. Now, the team members running the LAT have indicated that they, too, found a 135-GeV gamma-ray line coming from near the galactic core. However, Andrea Albert, one of the Fermi team members from the Ohio State University, says the signal only has a 3.35-sigma local significance. That means there is not yet definite evidence of a signal, and it could just be variation in the background or a data processing artifact. Albert also says that the team detected a similar, though even less significant, signal at the same energy level when the telescope looked at the outer rim of Earth’s atmosphere. If so, then both signals could be the result of some artifact of data collection or processing. Albert says that, within the next year, the team hopes to have enough evidence to determine whether the signal is real.
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Theoretical physicists seem so desperate to find the putative WIMPs (AWOL for over 40 years) that they will latch onto almost any phenomenon and crown it a possible discovery of WIMPs. The number of false-positives over the last 40 years is amazing, and still the beat goes on.
Time for new ideas, like primordial black holes? Time for studying nature instead of trying to squeeze nature into an ill-fitting theoretical box?
Robert L. Oldershaw
Discrete Scale Relativity
http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
They may have recorded something completely different. Conformal Gravity solves the cosmological constant problem where we don’t need dark matter. Rather than assuming and studying the signal as a possible dark matter particle event, they should look into other possibilities of its origin.
ADDENDUM
“How can physics live up to its true greatness except by a new revolution in outlook which dwarfs all its past revolutions? And when it comes, will we not say to each other, ‘Oh, how beautiful and simple it all is! How could we ever have missed it for so long!’.” John Archibald Wheeler