Shedding light on darkness: A NASA image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, shows what is inferred to be a massive ring of dark matter exerting a gravitational effect on light from the galactic cluster CL0024+17.
Credit: NASA
Cheeky science
The photograph "doesn't seem to us such a big deal,"
Cirelli told Cosmos Online. "We live in the 21st century, we had our camera in the backpack because we had foreseen some sightseeing of Stockholm after the conference, and we suspected that the PAMELA speaker would have shown these eagerly expected data without releasing the actual image."
"Taking the picture is just a little 'technological step' above keeping a mental record of the results shown and using them in further work," he said. "This is what people have always done and this is what conferences are for: communicating your results and taking the results of others in. With a camera or with your eyes."
Cirelli added that the PAMELA scientists also agreed that they could use the data in their study. The researchers involved with PAMELA have yet to officially comment, or release any of their own findings based on the data.
Australian astrophysicist Geraint Lewis, from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Sydney, said while taking the photo was "very cheeky", it was not the first instance he'd seen. "People have done this sort of thing for years to try and get ahead in the game".
"It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming days and weeks, especially when the PAMELA results are released. I don't know if there will be a political comeback on these guys for publishing," he said. "[But] I don't think they'll be going for drinks with the PAMELA guys."
Narrowing the search
Commenting on the science itself, Lewis said that the researchers' model, which predicts high-energy positrons at a similar, but lower, level than those found by PAMELA, was a "reasonably good match".
Lewis doesn't believe the research is the "smoking gun" to reveal the particle behind dark matter particle, though: "There's enough freedom in the parameters of [the adjusted standard models] which means they may fit many data sets," he said. "We'll see other people's models appear in the next few days that say the same thing."
Cirelli argued that a crucial test of their own and other physicist's models of dark matter will come from the data at higher energies to be released by the PAMELA (which stands for Payload for Antimatter-Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) team in the future.
If their own model is confirmed, the experiment represented the first time that such clear evidence of dark matter had been seen, said Cirelli. It would mean that scientists could narrow down the search for that dark matter to a particle with specific properties of mass, which interacted weakly with normal matter and yielded high-energy positrons as a consequence of those interactions.
