Theoretical physicist Tracy Slatyer proposes new scenarios for dark matter and helped discover the Fermi bubbles.
At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buyingby Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.”
Physicists know dark matter exists because they can see its gravitational influence on galaxies, galaxy clusters and the overall evolution of the universe. Beyond that, there are few clues to work with. Slatyer has helped imagine the myriad ways that dark matter could leave some subtle signature on the fabric of reality that would show up in observations.
In 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which offered unprecedented views of high-energy photons emanating from the galactic plane. If dark matter was indeed self-annihilating, it would show up in Fermi’s observations. The next year, Slatyer and Finkbeiner used Fermi’s public data to hunt for the stuff.
Towering structures called the Fermi bubbles spread 25,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way, as shown in this artist’s impression. The mysterious structures are thought to be connected to processes in the galactic center, though nobody is sure of their origin.Supermassive black holes feeding on gas and dust in the centers of other galaxies have been known to belch out material into hourglass figures.
Such ideas could help explain what the James Webb Space Telescope has been seeing as it peers into cosmic history. The telescope appears to have found
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