A 90-year-old cosmological cold case may
finally have been solved.
For decades, there was a silent operator
lurking in the shadows of the universe.
One that doesn't emit light or reflect
it. One that our telescopes can't see
despite the fact that there is six times
more of it than there is of the regular
matter that makes up you and me. What
I'm talking about, of course, is dark
matter. It's fundamental to our models
of the universe. And yet, we still don't
have a clue what it is. Physicists
across the globe are using
state-of-the-art particle accelerators.
Underground laboratories and telescopes
in an attempt to detect direct evidence
of this elusive matter with zero
success.
But in November 2025, a paper was
published that rocked the scientific
community. Whilst trolling all data from
the Fermy telescope, a researcher may
have finally captured a glimpse, a
telltale signature coming from inside
the Milky Way. But how can we be sure
it's dark matter producing this signal?
And will this mystery finally help us
explain what dark matter is after all
this time? I'm Alex Mccoan and you're
watching Astram. Join me today as we
probe this juicy new lead and answer the
question that I know you're all
thinking. Did we just see dark matter?
This is Fritzviki,
a Swiss astronomer born in 1898 who
spent most of his life working at the
California Institute of Technology in
the United States of America. His time
at Caltech began as part of a research
group studying the physics of crystal
structure, but he was soon swept up in
the exciting, newly emerging field of
cosmology. Probing the mysteries of the
cosmos became passion. And while he was
well known for having an eccentric
personality, his biggest legacies were
his discoveries.
His research into the origin of cosmic
rays led to his conceptualization and
coining of the term supernova.
He cataloged tens of thousands of
galaxies and over the span of his career
published hundreds of papers on a wide
array of astronomical subjects. But
despite all this, he is best known as
the father of dark matter. In 1933, aged
35,
was measuring the red shift of galaxies
using the Mount Wilson telescope, the
very same that Edwin Hubble had used to
prove our universe was expanding just a
few years before. Red shift is a
phenomenon whereby the light from a
distant object is stretched on its
journey from source to observer. The
more it's stretched, the longer the
wavelength becomes and the redder the
light appears. This indicates that the
source is moving away.
Zeroing in on a small patch of sky in
the Coma Baron's constellation near the
Milky Way's north pole, Ziki spotted
something incredible. Galaxies within
the Coma cluster were traveling at
speeds that seemed impossible given the
commonly accepted laws of physics.
Sitting at his desk, he began to
calculate the difference in velocities
between eight of the galaxies. It was
more than 2,000 km per second. These
galaxies were traveling at such high
speeds that this cluster should have
ripped itself limb from limb long ago.
How could what he was seeing with his
very eyes be reconciled with the figures
on the page? Calculating the mass of the
cluster, Vicki realized that the
gravitational pull of the stars and gas
alone was not strong enough to stop the
galaxies from escaping one another. In
fact, he worked out that the system
needed around 10 times more mass than
had been observed just to stay together.
He concluded that something more must be
at work, something dark, enough to be
concealed from view, lurking deep within
the cluster to anchor these galaxies in
orbit.
What was this dark matter?
The question of dark matter's true
identity has continued to plague
cosmologists since Ziki's study on the
Koma cluster over 90 years ago. Dark
matter was so-called because of its very
nature. This is a substance that doesn't
interact with light. This is a problem
because light is the primary tool we use
to probe our universe and understand how
it works from the micro to the macro.
Dark matter doesn't emit light nor
reflect it. And it doesn't even absorb
light to cast a shadow. So it is truly
invisible. And like Vicki, we instead
have to observe its ghostly effect on
objects that are visible to us in order
to perceive its presence.
We know dark matter is there and that it
exerts a gravitational force on visible
matter. But we don't actually know what
dark matter is. The two leading theories
today are wimps and axons. Though we've
not yet found hard evidence for either
of them until November 2025, that is
when that news erupted from the
University of Tokyo.
Astrophysicist Dr. Tommonary Tortani had
found a signal never identified before
emanating from the Milky Way and it
appeared to have the properties of being
produced by wimps. Was this the first
observational evidence of dark matter?
To answer this question, we need to
understand the nature of a wimp. No, we
don't think they are particularly shy or
cowardly creatures, but they have been
highly successful in evading our
detection so far. This is a class of
particles predicted to exist within an
extension of the standard model of
particle physics known as super
symmetry. Wimps being weakly interacting
neither absorb nor emit light and they
very rarely interact with other
particles other than through
gravitational attraction
which ticks many of the boxes we're
looking for when it comes to searching
for dark matter. These properties also
make them very challenging to observe.
However, there is a way in which we
should be able to detect the presence of
wimps and this is through a process
called annihilation.
In the standard model, all particles
have an anti-particle pair. For example,
the proton has its antimatter
counterpart, an anti-roton.
Both the proton and anti-roton have the
same mass but possess an equal and
opposing electric charge. Another
example is the negatively charged
electron whose pair is the positively
charged posetron. You might not realize
it, but antimatter is everywhere. It's
even emitted by your regular banana.
When a particle meets its antiparticle,
they cancel each other out and
annihilate, releasing a signature burst
of radiation, often in the form of
photons and gamma rays. The energy
profile of those gamma rays can be
measured and is related to the mass of
the original particles. We believe the
mass of a wimp to be between 10 and
thousands of times that of a proton.
Yes, that's quite the range. And the
resulting gamma rays would have a
corresponding energy signature. If
another eccentric physicist by the name
of Albert Einstein is coming to mind for
you right now, you'd be correct to make
this connection. Einstein's famous
equation E= MC² revealed that mass and
energy are interchangeable and the
annihilation of a pair of particles is
the most beautiful and fundamental
example of this formula in action.
Anyway, back to dark matter. Gamma rays
are incredibly helpful clues for
astronomers. Like fingerprints left at a
crime scene, they indicate where
activity has occurred in a region of the
galaxy and where it may be pertinent to
take a closer look. However, both gamma
rays and fingerprints can be left by a
myriad of different sources, which
creates a serious issue. Gamma rays are
created and released in all sorts of
astrophysical processes, from the hot
accretion discs around black holes to
the death throws of a dying star.
So, how can we detect the true signal of
dark matter if it is the annihilation of
wimps in such a maelstrom?
Well, it takes a new and honestly quite
painstaking approach.
In early 2024, Dr. Tortani began
dredging through the Fermy telescope's
enormous back catalog for clues in
solving this dark matter conundrum. The
Fermy telescope is an incredible piece
of hardware designed to spot gamma ray
bursts in distant galaxies. And while I
astron 5 at checkout get 5% off their purchase. Now, just like Borders galaxy,
our own Milky Way is a spiral, flat and
wide. The gravitational geography of our
galaxy dictates that the majority of
visible matter is concentrated in the
galactic plane. From the outer tendrils
of the spiral arms to the densely packed
galactic center, all manner of stars,
planets, and our Bmouth super massive
black hole Sagittarius A star make up
our home galaxy. Naturally, this means
that the majority of sources of high
energy radiation that is gamma rays are
located in the plane too. But when we
observe the movement of stars and gas
around the galaxy, this indicates that
the dark matter has a different shape.
It is not concentrated in the galactic
plane as we might expect, but it extends
around the Milky Way in a sphere
structure termed the halo. By scraping
15 years worth of Fmy data and blocking
out the blinding gammaray rich center of
the galaxy from his study, Dr. Totani
has been able to diligently remove known
astrophysical producers of gamma rays
from the background source by source.
What was left has flawed the scientific
community and me. Honestly, this is so
exciting. A unique pattern of gamma rays
in the ghostly shape of the Milky Ways
predicted dark matter halo. But Dr.
Totani's research takes this theory
another step further. Not only were
these gamma rays revealed to be
populating the correct shape and
structure to be the dark matter halo,
but they had an energy spectrum peaking
at 20 giga electron volts.
This is in the suitable range to be
caused by WIMP annihilation. If this
gammaray signal is from wimps, it cannot
be underestimated.
This observation will have changed the
face of physics forever.
But before we can be absolutely sure,
there are still a few puzzling parts of
this case to solve. Firstly, we're still
getting to grips with exactly how much
mass wimps do have and therefore the
energy signature expected to be produced
during annihilation. After all, they are
still only theoretical particles. And
while teams at particle accelerators
around the world continue to have
success in constraining their
properties, we're so far limited in
working with the rather wide range I
mentioned earlier. There are also
concerns over the population density of
wimps required to produce an
annihilation signal as strong as the one
measured in Dr. Tatani's study. Wimps
are relics created from particles
present at the big bang. And by studying
the early universe through evidence like
the cosmic microwave background, we have
a good sense of the numbers of each
particle we expect to be populating the
universe today. The signal seems like a
much denser collection of WIMPs than we
would expect to be possible from this
evidence and particle physics models
thus far. But this field of research is
one that can't afford to ignore new
leads. And right now, WIMP annihilation
and therefore dark matter is a strong
contender for what this gammaray signal
might be. Some even argue the strongest.
But given we've never seen a wimp, many
are ering on the side of caution.
Professor Carlos Frank, a lifetime
researcher of dark matter and one of the
originators of the leading old dark
matter theory, including wimps, has
likened finding the source of dark
matter in significance to humanity as
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
It's not something you claim to have
found unless you really are sure.
So scientists are excitedly working to
help better determine the factors that
could be at play in Totani signal so
that they can untangle the snags and
gain a more definitive answer. One thing
is for sure though, the more we discover
at the Rubicon of this fantastical
microworld of quantum and particle
physics and the vast expanse of
cosmology and general relativity, the
closer we get to solving the biggest
mystery of our universe in unifying the
two. So, is this enough to lay this cold
case to rest? Unfortunately, not yet.
While this is brilliant new evidence and
a well-needed reinjjection of energy in
what has been a relatively stale search
for dark matter of late, there is still
more work to do before we can close the
case file on WIMPs. If WIMPs really are
at work here, we would expect to see
similar gammaray signals in our dwarf
galaxy neighbors and beyond. So, what
can we do next?
The latest investigator on the scene is
the new Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Vera Rubin was a prolific researcher in
the field of dark matter. In the 1970s,
she discovered the effect of dark matter
on the velocities of individual star
populations in over 60 galaxies. And it
was Vera's work on categorizing these
effects that brought serious
consideration to the theory for the
first time. This was a pivotal moment in
convincing the scientific community that
dark matter was a real and a valuable
thing to study. The observatory of her
namesake came online in June 2025 and
data sets from the first schedule of
observing are expected for release in
2026.
through taking hundreds of images of the
southern hemisphere sky each night,
amounting to 20 terabytes of data, or
the equivalent of 78 standard iPhone
17s. The Reuben Observatory hopes to
uncover objects never before seen in our
night sky. At the end of the first
10-year survey, this raw image data is
expected to sum up to more than 60
pabytes or 60 million gigabytes in a
monster effort to reveal these secrets
of our universe.
Dark matter makes up more than 80% of
all the matter we know, and it is
fundamental to the very fabric of our
existence. Its gravitational influence
enabled the formation of the first baby
stars and galaxies at the cosmic dawn.
It sculpted our cosmos to look the way
it does today. And dark matter will
continue to influence the fate of our
future, too. This new study presenting
the first indications of the presence of
wimps in our galaxy is the most exciting
development in the observational search
for dark matter for decades. I can't
wait to see the fresh research that
stems from it. In Switzerland and South
Dakota, from Chile to low Earth orbit,
brilliant human minds are on the case to
find the true nature of dark matter,
elusive wimps or not. So stay tuned
because we might just be on the cusp of
a dark revolution. And isn't it a thrill
to watch it unfold?
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