“Neutron star mergers are extremely rare,” explained Columbia University astrophysicist Brian Metzger in an email to The Daily Galaxy about the exotic phenomenon known as a kilonova, “occurring only once every 10 or 100 thousand years in galaxies like our own. There certainly were many kilonovae in the distant past in the Milky Way that may have appeared similar to bright novae on the night sky to our ancestors, but likely none since the advent of modern astronomy.”
“Something like the diffuse glow of gamma ray background that permeates our Milky Way Galaxy could conceivably be evidence for dark matter,” researcher Mark Krumholz, a theoretical and computational astrophysicist at Australian National University, told The Daily Galaxy.