Despite making up more than a quarter of the universe, dark matter has remained stubbornly hidden from scientists’ telescopes for decades.

However, researchers from Johns Hopkins University now believe they have found the evidence they were looking for.

Although the invisible substance does not emit any energy on its own, when dark matter particles collide, they produce a burst of gamma radiation, notes the Daily Mail.

For this reason, researchers believe that the mysterious glow of gamma rays coming from inside our own galaxy could reveal exactly where dark matter is hiding.

If they are right, this could be the first concrete evidence that dark matter really exists.

“Dark matter dominates the universe and holds galaxies together,” said Professor Joseph Silk, one of the authors of the study.

“It’s extremely important and we’re constantly thinking of ideas about how we might detect it,” he said.

Gamma rays, specifically the excess light we observe in the center of our galaxy, could be our first evidence,” he noted.

Dark matter is an undefined type of particle that makes up much of the extra mass “missing” from most galaxies.

Although scientists can see the gravitational effects that this hidden mass creates, dark matter does not emit any energy that can be detected by our telescopes.

Since 2008, NASA’s Fermi satellite has been slowly piecing together a picture of our Milky Way galaxy using gamma rays.

When scientists examined this gamma-ray image of the galaxy, they noticed something extremely unusual.

The center of the Milky Way appeared to be filled with a diffuse glow of gamma radiation that did not appear to come from any particular source.

To explain this phenomenon, scientists have proposed two competing explanations.

Either the glow was caused by the spinning cores of dying stars, or it was caused by the collision of dark matter.

In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers used supercomputers to create a map of the location of dark matter in the galaxy.

What made their approach different was that they took into account how our Galaxy was formed.

“We have increased the chances that dark matter has been detected indirectly.”

It is still possible that the gamma radiation is produced by rotating neutron stars.

“Our galaxy was formed from a huge cloud of dark matter,” explains Professor Silk.

“Ordinary matter cooled and fell into the central regions, taking some dark matter with it,” he says.

For billions of years, dark matter from these other systems was attracted to the dense galactic core and the number of collisions increased.

When Professor Silk took these simulations and compared them to real images of the galaxy taken by Fermi, he found that their predictions matched.

While this is not yet “hard proof” for the existence of dark matter, it does raise the tantalizing possibility that the gamma-ray glow actually comes from dark matter.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Professor Silk said: “Our key new result is that dark matter fits the gamma-ray data at least as well as the rival neutron star hypothesis.”

Professor Silk says his “great hope” is that the soon-to-be-built Cerenkov Telescope Array in Chile will be able to settle the dispute once and for all.

This will be the most powerful gamma-ray telescope in the world and will have the sensitivity to detect the tiny differences between gamma rays produced by dark matter and radiation from rotating neutron stars.

Alternatively, the telescope could scan nearby dwarf galaxies, which should be composed mostly of dark matter.

“Detecting the same signal that Fermi found for the galactic center would confirm the dark matter hypothesis,” says Professor Silk.