There’s a little buzz out there on this paper which appeared a few days ago in the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper is from an Italian-led instrument known as PAMELA, which you may remember made headlines after discovering an excess of anti-electrons (aka positrons) flitting about space.

As Sean Carroll points out on Cosmic Variance, this is hardly new. It appeared on the popular preprint server arXiv back in October. Most theorists have already taken the constraints set by the paper into account when formulating their ideas.

The jury’s still out on whether these theories are right, but there should be more data soon. The Fermi Telescope, which was launched by NASA last summer, should soon see gamma rays from the galactic centre, if, that is, dark matter is the cause of PAMELA’s signal.