(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists from Johns Hopkins University have uncovered the mystery of the inexplicable glow of the universe.
This phenomenon was discovered thanks to the New Horizons probe. After he passed Pluto and reached the outer limits of the solar system, his instruments showed that interstellar space emits optical light.
Scientists have previously known about the so-called cosmic optical background. But the light turned out to be twice as much as theoretical calculations indicated.
New scientific work has shown that light may be a “by-product” of dark matter. It is believed that this substance makes up to 80% of the Universe, but it is impossible to detect it by direct observations.
According to one version, dark matter may consist of axions, hypothetical particles first described back in the 1970s.
Scientists came to the conclusion that in the presence of a powerful magnetic field, axions break up into pairs of photons.
The authors of the new scientific work conducted computer simulations.
His results showed that axions with masses between 8 and 20 electron volts, under certain conditions, can produce a signal similar to that recorded by New Horizons.
The scientists noted that their study cannot be considered as direct evidence of the existence of dark matter.
But it is important for future experiments to search for this substance. So, if an excess of light really arises from the decay of dark matter into a photon line, this process can be fixed using modern instruments.
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