In recent months there have been detections from the sun and in orbit around Earth, but now scientists think they have found it in neighbouring galaxies.
They spotted photon emissions coming from space - and one of the best possible explanations is that they came from particles of dark matter.
Two groups have recently announced that they have detected a signal that could be a sign of dark matter, with the research to be published next week in Physical Review Letters.
One of them, which included Lausanne-based Swiss Federal Institute of Technology scientists Dr Oleg Ruchayskiy and Dr Alexey Boyarsky, found it by analysing X-rays emitted by two celestial objects - the Perseus galaxy cluster and the Andromeda galaxy.
After having collected thousands of signals from the Esa's XMM-Newton telescope and eliminated all those coming from known particles and atoms, they detected an anomaly that, even considering the possibility of instrument or measurement error, caught their attention.
The signal appears in the X-ray spectrum as a weak, abnormal photon emission that could not be attributed to any known form of matter.
Above all, ‘the signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter, that is, concentrated and intense in the centre of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges,’ explained Dr Ruchayskiy.
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