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Dark Matter's Profile Discovered?

Posted by michael on from the dark-visions-in-daylight dept.

pingbak writes "According to New Scientist, astronomers may have potentially discovered dark matter's EM profile (story). For the rest of us, this means astronomers may have just discovered all of the extra force holding the galaxy(-ies) together, which is not currently explainable though gravity and black holes at the center of universes alone. Since dark matter doesn't interact with ordinary matter, it's almost directly undetectable -- but now, physics and astronomy may just have had an awesome breakthrough. Nobel Prize material if it proves correct!"

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Dark Matter Explaination? by Randolpho · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Um... perhaps I'm very much misinformed, which is entirely possible, but the article submission makes the claim that Dark Matter doesn't interact with regular matter.

    WTF? I thought the reason we're looking for Dark Matter is because the matter we *know* about doesn't add up to cause the gravetic interactions that we can observe. I thought Dark Matter was just matter we couldn't observe just yet, not some exotic "doesn't work the same as other matter" matter.

    Am I totally wrong here?

    --
    "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
    -Marilyn Manson
    1. Re:Dark Matter Explaination? by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They've looked pretty hard and carefully for normal, baryonic matter to cause the effects. So far, little has turned up.

      On the other hand, it's pretty clear at this point that dark matter in *some* form must exist. It's just a simple grasp of gravity coupled with some weird observations that lead to this conclusion. It is, in fact, very similar to the way Neptune was discovered. First, notice something odd about Uranus's orbit, then realize that another planet at position X could explain it. Just do it with galaxies and clusters, instead, and you start to suspect there's dark matter out there. Do some surveys and find that there doesn't appear to be enough brown dwarfs and black holes to make up the needed mass.

      To be honest, while I'm a planetary scientist and thus obligated to make fun of cosmologists, I don't find dark matter, even heretofore undiscovered particles, that hard to believe. Not only is the evidence pretty good, it isn't difficult to imagine that we've only scratched the surface of what is out there. You suggest that we're just finding "what's out there" (a claim with which I might quibble). So why is hard to believe that we haven't found all of the particles in the subatomic zoo? Especially given that the ones we seek are, by definition, difficult to find.

      And if you want "too convoluted to be natural", study quantum mechanics. It seems the universe doesn't care what we consider to be "natural", after all.

      (And now, a few quibbles: the SNP was only recently really clinched with lab data, but people had speculated about the solution, neutrino oscillations, for quite a while before hand. The same is true of a lot of what HST and others have told us in the past decade: usually, they're helping refine our models and confirm our best guesses as to what's out there. So it isn't like astronomers a decade ago would be shocked at what we've learned.)

  2. a little from column A, a little from... by bscott · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What they mean by "weakly interacting" is similar to how neutrinos are described - it doesn't have much of an electromagnetic impression, so it doesn't block light or smack into a detector in an earthbound observatory. Unlike neutrinos, it does posess a significant mass and is affected by gravity. And while that is "exotic", astrophysicists were only forced to consider this sort of thing when all previous efforts to explain some pretty obvious mis-matches in the numbers didn't work.

    Now I'll let someone else explain about "dark energy"...

    --
    Perfectly Normal Industries
  3. Re:Electronium? by barawn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Positronium.

    It has a half-life of 0.1 uS. It's a relatively standard physics problem at the graduate school level to ask what the binding energy of positronium is.

    If it ever comes up, it's (1/2) the binding energy of a hydrogen atom. The reasoning is simple - a positron and a proton have the same charge, but a positron and an electron have the same mass, so the "reduced mass factor" is 1/2, rather than 1. (M_p/(m_e+m_p) ~= 1) vs (M_e/(m_e+m_e) = 1/2).