According to a discovery to be published in
The Astrophysical Journal, Douglas Finkbeiner who is astronomer at Princeton University, has been
detecting microwave radiation across the whole sky, coming from the center of the Milky Way. While he isn't sure what causes the radiation, he
proposes it may actually be a view of
dark matter.
"The WMAP team cares about the cosmological signal and has carefully removed the foreground signals so they don't interfere with it," says
Finkbeiner, "but these foreground signals are interesting in their own right."
According to WMAP scientists, non-cosmological microwaves could come from ionized hydrogen in our own Milky Way Galaxy, interstellar dust, and from
the fast electrons found in supernova remnants. But Finkbeiner set out to quantify these local sources to see if, together, they match the non-CMB
component of WMAP's observations.
They do, he found, with one interesting exception: An unexplainable haze surrounds the center of the Milky Way, extending out to about 20º on the sky.
If you take account of its strength at different wavelengths, this radiation looks like what ionized hydrogen atoms emit — only there aren't enough
of those around. The radiation also looks like what would be emitted by fast electrons in a magnetic field — but they would have to be moving near the
speed of light.
And that's what gave Finkbeiner the idea that he might have discovered the signal of dark matter. He has put forward his theory in an
as-yet-unpublished paper and at a conference on dark matter held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in September.
Read more and view quite an amazing image at
astronomy.com 
