Dr Ritz said that such “indirect” dark matter detections in far-flung parts of the cosmos could complement the kind of searches for never-before-seen particles that are going on at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider.

In fact, the motions of charged particles in extreme magnetic fields that give rise to many of the gamma rays that Fermi sees are just like particle accelerators.

“It’s one of the things I like about this field – the biggest things and the smallest things in the Universe are neatly tied together in surprising ways.”

Fermi gamma-ray image updates ‘extreme Universe’ view