Closing in on Dark Matter: Another “Tentative” Step.
Photo Above: A galaxy cluster with the distribution of dark matter marked by purple overlay. Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Julio (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM).

When physicists and mathematicians want to get an idea into circulation before going through all the hoo-hah of peer-reviewed publication, they often post a paper on the arXiv server, where anyone who is curious can go and read it. Some arXiv papers turn out to be important, but much evaporates on closer inspection. Judging whether a new arXiv paper is one or the other can be extremely difficult. That is certainly the case with physicist Christoph Weniger’s paper, “A Tentative Gamma-Ray Line from Dark Matter Annihilation at the Fermi Large Area Telescope,” posted on April 12, on dark matter.

Continue Reading…