Dark Matter Hunter Who Found Unexpected, Giant 'Fermi Bubbles' Wins $100,000 Physics Prize
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Dark matter hunter who found unexpected, giant 'Fermi bubbles' wins $100,000 physics prize:
Tracy Slatyer, known for hunting dark matter in our galaxy and discovering evidence of an ancient Milky Way explosion, has won a $100,000 New Horizons Prize in Physics.
Slatyer, an MIT physicist originally from Australia, is most famous as a co-discoverer of the "Fermi Bubbles." While looking for hints of dark matter's signature in the gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, she and her colleagues found never-before-seen structures extending far above and below the galactic disk - aftershocks of a black hole outburst from millions of years ago that came to be known as "Fermi bubbles" after the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. But Slatyer is still hunting dark matter and has found promising (though still tentative) hints of the stuff at the galactic center.
The New Horizons award, given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation each year, goes to "early career" researchers like Slatyer, who got her Ph.D. in 2010 and was hired at MIT in 2013. New Horizons prizes are smaller than the $3 million prizes Breakthrough hands out each year, typically to older and more established scientists. Slatyer was the only solo winner of a 2021 New Horizons prize in Physics, with the other two awards going to research teams of four members each. The prize money is donated by a group of tech billionaires (Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Jack Ma and Pony Ma).
Breakthrough awarded Slatyer the prize "For major contributions to particle astrophysics, from models of dark matter to the discovery of the "Fermi Bubbles."
Slatyer spends a lot of her time refining models of dark matter - working out precisely how its particles might behave and the implications of those different possibilities. And the rest of her time is spent hunting them down.
"It was a complete surprise," Slatyer told Live Science. "The prize wasn't even on my radar."
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