'Wukong' may help crack the secrets of dar...

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The strange peak was picked up by the Dark Matter Particle Explorer, nicknamed Wukong, at around 1.4 trillion electronvolts, when the flux of cosmic ray electrons and positrons suddenly rose before collapsing.

"This phenomena is unexpected because no other stellar events behave like this at such high energy," said Fan Yizhong, deputy chief designer of Wukong's scientific application system.

"Our best guess is it could be due to a special astrophysical event, or some weird new particles," Fan said. "We will collect more data in this energy range to make sure this is not a fluke, so it is still too early say we found something groundbreaking."

The discovery was part of the first published scientific results of Wukong, which was named after the Monkey King in the classic novel Journey to the West . The results were published in the science journal Nature on Thursday.

Launched in December 2015, Wukong is China's first astronomical satellite and is tasked with finding dark matter, an invisible ingredient that makes up around 25 percent of the universe yet cannot interact with any known matter other than through gravity, said Chang Jin, the Wukong project's chief scientist.

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