Despite the fact that no one has ever seen dark matter, scientists claim it makes up 85 percent of the world.
A recently released study claims an x-ray signal has been discovered in a collection of galaxies 250 million light years away from Earth.
The signal from Perseus A is a mystery for astronomers, but could be a sign of dark matter.
"We know that the dark matter explanation is a long shot, but the payoff would be huge if we're right," said Esra Bulbul, who led the research into the strange spike in x-ray emissions,
Bulbul's work was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.
What dark matter is composed of exactly is theoretical since it has never been observed or even seen.
So far, scientist's best guess is that dark matter is made up of a sterile neutrinos, which is a type of neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle.
"We're going to keep testing this interpretation and see where it takes us," said Bulbul -- an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
NASA's highly sensitive Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite were used to find the x-ray spike.
Despite the discovery, scientists feel they need more precise observations of the x-ray emissions if they're going to figure out a more definitive conclusion.
"We have a lot of work to do before we can claim, with any confidence, that we've found sterile neutrinos," admitted study co-author Maxim Markevitch, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, according to the release. "But just the possibility of finding them has us very excited."
Though normal matter could be the reason for the spike, experts feel that the pattern doesn't mesh well since hot gases are believed to give off x-rays.
"Our next step is to combine data from Chandra and JAXA's (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's) Suzaku mission for a large number of galaxy clusters to see if we find the same X-ray signal," explained co-author Adam Foster, one of Bulbul's colleagues in Cambridge, according to the release.
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