I attended a nice talk by Doug Finkbeiner about the possibility that excess flux in the WMAP CMB maps is due to dark-matter annihilation. It is a crazy hypothesis, but the next-best are that: (1) the black hole at the center of the Milky Way was orders of magnitude more powerful in gamma-rays 1 Myr ago, or (2) bulge stars have crazy chromospheric properties. Deep observations of nearby galaxies will be decisive.
I inspected (by eye) the hands-off astrometry output for the KPNO mosaic data and found several egregious faliures, such as this one. Clearly we need to be careful. For now we may just stop all fits at second order.
There is a third option, 3) you are high.
ReplyDeleteTell Finkbeiner to mail back my Devo CD ASAP.