Astronomers have uncovered a perplexing discovery while analyzing 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The find, presented by Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was unexpected and as yet unexplained. The gamma-ray signal, discovered in a different part of the sky and with a much stronger intensity than anticipated, has raised significant intrigue.
The signal’s location and magnitude parallel another unexplained feature linked to some of the most energetic cosmic particles ever detected. The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, have left researchers puzzling over this unforeseen phenomenon, as it appears in a direction similar to a different unexplained feature.
The research team had initially been searching for a gamma-ray feature associated with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe. The CMB started to emerge when the hot and expanding universe had sufficiently cooled to form the first atoms, emitting a burst of light that permeated the cosmos for the first time.
