New Subatomic Particle Could Help Explain the Mystery of Dark Matter: Scientific American

New Subatomic Particle Could Help Explain the Mystery of Dark Matter: Scientific American: How did scientists go about looking for particles that are virtually undetectable? Kusenko and Michael Loewenstein of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reasoned that if sterile neutrinos really are dark matter, they would occasionally decay into ordinary matter, producing a lighter neutrino and an x-ray photon, and it would make sense to search for these x-rays wherever dark matter is found. Using the Chandra x-ray telescope, they observed a nearby dwarf galaxy thought to be rich in dark matter and found an intriguing bump of x-rays at just the right wavelength.