A New Look at Dark Matter

Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Dr. Elisa Pueschel from the Institute of Astronomy at Ruhr University Bochum is focusing on this in her “Dark100” project: The focus is on a still unexplored mass range of dark matter particles. By utilising novel, cost-effective telescope technology, Dark100 will deploy a series of telescopes capable of studying dark matter annihilation and improving on the sensitivity of currently operating and planned gamma-ray instruments by an order of magnitude, with unprecedented energy and angular resolution.

Driven by recent theoretical developments, both in tools and motivation, Dark100 will search for dark matter particles between 100 teraelectron volts and several tens of petaelectron volts. Dark100 will build a unique dataset of deep gamma-ray observations of dark-matter-rich astrophysical systems. Dark matter will potentially be detected, or in the event of non-detection, limits on its velocity-weighted annihilation cross section will be set. For a non-detection, dark matter will be ruled out for part of the probed mass range and theoretical models constrained for the full probed mass range.

The grant is funded with approximately 2,3 million euros for five years.