Antimatter enthusiasts will love it; dark matter hunters not so much. NASA's FERMI satellite has confirmed a previous hint that there is more antimatter than expected coming from space. The bad news is that the result almost certainly rules out dark matter as the source.
The results were reported online by the FERMI Large Area Telescope Collaboration. They hit the web just in time for the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics conference taking place in Munich, Germany, this week, where they were immediately incorporated into the first talks.
As far as antimatter is concerned, the results back up intriguing signals picked up in 2008 by the Russian-European PAMELA satellite. The result showed that there were more positrons – the antimatter counterpart of electrons – coming from space than were expected from known processes and sources.
"This is a powerful independent corroboration of the PAMELA result," says Pasquale Serpico of the Annecy Le Vieux Theoretical Physics Laboratory, France, who is not part of the FERMI team.
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