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Astronomers Find Star-Less Galaxy
Wohngebaeudeversicherung writes "Astronomers have discovered a galaxy about 50 million lightyears away from earth that appears to be composed entirly of dark matter. This galaxy, dubbed VIRGOHI21 is rotating like a real galaxy, at speeds only explainable through massive amounts of matter, thought no single visible star could be detected."
I suggest we donate one of our stars. How about Ben Affleck?
...that I click on "Read More" to find out about matter that's invisible to us and all I get is:
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Brilliant.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Astronomers have discovered a galaxy about 50 million darkyears away from Virgo that appears to be composed entirly of light matter. This galaxy, dubbed EARTHHI21 is rotating like a real galaxy, at speeds only explainable through massive amounts of matter, thought no single dark mass could be detected."
MORTAR COMBAT!
Should't that be 50 million darkyears?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've been getting that too, all morning long. I know it's offtopic but WTF?
Insert witty sig here.
I love the picture of the night sky with a big circle around a nondescript part. I looked at it was like "oicic."
Where primetime TV is actually entertaining?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
No stars, and I bet the food is crappy as well.
... I submit that it be named the "Goatse Galaxy".
Trolling is a art,
It its comprised of large amounts of Dark Matter, how can they tell that its spinning?
... and in the DRM, bind them.
My quest is over! Bizarro world, I have found ye!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Could there be a star producing waves outside of the renages we are trying to detect?
Evolution or ID?
Maybe the entire galaxy is surrounded by particles of dust from a long-destroyed supercomputer?
You probably shouldn't click this.
What the speed of dark is.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
1913'Webster mentioned that "The term has recently been used for remote clusters of stars".
So I guess it will have to be updated.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
To think he thought the missing matter was the polystyrene used in packaging... ;)
One good turn - gets all the covers.
It's made entirely out of dark matter? How will that affect my force points? I can't be really evil if the entire galaxy is dark!
Aha! It's intelligent life! They must have engineered millions of Dyson Spheres over all the stars of their galaxy!
Do you like Japanese imports?
you know, i clicked on the link just to see if there was a picture of it...
yeah, i'm not thinking too quick today...
Isn't this what they've been telling us to look for for years now - the entire energy output of a galaxy caught and channelled for use by an intelligence that has spread throughout it's own galaxy?
Just a slight delay between the topic being posted and the actual content of the article, AFAIK.
Seems a little strange, but it's probably because of the massive amounts of traffic Slashdot gets.
~ Crummy
I'll believe it when I see it.
Microsoft!
Agile Artisans
Have the scientists concidered that maybe its just a stage 3 civilization that's getting ready to pWn us?
Maybe its just a bunch of Matrioshka brains...
Or just wussy dyson shells....
Since this guy was doing radio observations, he must have detected a weak radio signature for Hydrogen emission from this dwarf galaxy. A bulk of hydrogen gas (still dark matter) would look different from that of blackholes in radio.
Could there be something blocking a star, like a blackhole or something?
Also, is it possible that there was once a star, but now there isn't.
Could they be rotating around something cold and solid, or something not burning bright enough to be visible at these distances
Geez! Dark Matter!? Astronomers calculations don't add up, so they invent "Dark Matter" as book keeping. If these guys were accountants they'd be in prison.
My favorite part of the article: Someone thought that circling the invisible galaxy in the picture was a helpful move.
Personally, I think articles with discoveries this exciting need to be written with more enthusiasm
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
A black hole (especially of that size) whould create a gravitational lens which could be spotted in the visible spectrum as well.
Shares for LenseCleaner Corp are sharply up in morning trading.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So, lots of mass and hot air, but no discernible light or stars.
Yeah, it sounds like pretty much every radio talk show host in the world.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So that's where the switch to turn off the internet's located...
Or a fishless school? A shipless starfleet nearby?
Seriously, a galaxy is a collection of stars. A starless galaxy is not a galaxy, else I have a starless galaxy in my drawer.
"Um, Bill? The lenscap is still on..."
We have clearly found the galaxy that the Romulan home-world resides within. Now if we can detect traces of ion trails that would reveal the cloaking......
.
-shpoffo
Each black hole is practically a point-like source, not good at blanketting to shield off the light from a bunch of stars all over the place. A thick smoke screen (like hydrogen) is better at doing that.
Besides, black holes may be bright in X-rays and other wavelengths. They should've been detected a long ago, if it were a full of BHs.
...and it doesn't require exotic quarks, leptons, or baryons to work.
Okay, that's an enormous (and highly unlikely) exaggeration, but I *have* thought of an interesting possibility. A Dyson Sphere surrounding several stars (or in a Type 3 civilization, an entire galaxy) would block visible light - the problem is it would glow in the infrared, so it wouldn't really be dark. Black holes are dark, but they tend to fling stuff around, and matter sucked into them gives off bursts of energy before they disappear.
The solution: a dark bubble. At the center of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole, which is (according to some estimates) roughly three million solar masses. A civilization putting a bubble around it would have 1 (earth) gravity a little beyond the orbit of Pluto, perhaps 40-45 A.U. or so. The problem is that you still would need to stick some stars around it to supply energy, and a Klemperer rosette would be pretty noticeable.
Well, light falling onto a blackhole blue shifts, increasing its energy. Increase the bubble enough (remember, we're talking a civilization that can harness the energy of a galaxy), and the mass of the bubble itself starts to warp space around it. There comes a point where the size of the bubble and the mass that makes it up can be just under the Schwarzschild limit - a bit more massive and it would be a black hole - even without a central singularity. For humans, we'd want a bubble that has a surface gravity equal to earth's, and a blue-shifted energy equal to the average output from our sun.
As a back-of-the envelope calculation, using v^2=2*g*R, where v is the escape velocity, g is the gravitational attraction at the earth's surface, and R is the radius from the center of mass, and setting v=c (the speed of light) for the maximum size, you get a bubble with a diameter just a bit under a light-year across (354 light days, if I figured correctly). The surface area would be about 3 square light-years, 2.6 x 10^26 square kilometers, or 5.2 x 10^17 times the surface area of the earth. The mass would be equivalent to 1.5 trillion suns - roughly twice the mass of our galaxy. Assuming you use buckytubes as the material of choice, you'd have a shell 7000 kilometers thick of solid buckminsterfullerene.
Of course, this is the absolute maximum size and mass just before it becomes a black hole, so the actual construct would be a bit smaller and less massive, balancing surface gravity and blue-shifted energy hitting the surface. You'd also want to carve out mountain ranges and oceans for a bit of variety - a galactic Kansas would be kind of boring. For safety reasons, you would have to stick these bubbles in the empty space between galaxies, or just use all of the mass in one large galaxy (you'd have to be careful, though, to keep relativistic rocks from flying at the completed project). You'd have a sky that would look kind of like a slow-moving aurora, perhaps -- infrared would be shifted into visible light, visible stars would have their peak shifted to ultraviolet -- especially since the gravitational warping would slow down time considerably compared to the rest of the galaxy.
To detect them, you'd have to aim telescopes at the "empty" parts of the sky and see if there was any gravitational lensing. If something was there that was far too massive to be a neutron star but didn't have the characteristics of a supermassive black hole, that could be a sign of it. The largest ones would have the gravitational mass of a large galaxy, so if a supercluster appears to be missing a galaxy's worth of stars that stellar motions demand, it might not be exotic matter but instead bubbles of normal matter from some vast engineering project.
Of course, it might be too early in the evolution of the universe for a type 3 civilization to appear, or you might not be able to make a buckytube bubble big enough that would also support its own weight, so exotic forms of matter might still be necessary. One thing's for certain, though - a bubble like this would make Ringworld look as spacious as a phone booth.
It doesn't have anything to do with black holes.
If it was a black hole, it would be detected by the movement of visible objects around it, or x-ray and gamma-ray bursts from acceleration jets and from energy emitted by the accretion disk.
Dark Matter is simply "missing matter", or matter that cannot be detected through emitted radiation. It can, however, be detected through its (gravitational) effects on surrounding bodies.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder where you are.
Lightyears away in VIRGOHI21 so far
Oh why can't I see you, you naughty naughty star.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment. Had that experiment not been possible it would have been very premature to jump to the conclusion that there is no aether. When it comes to dark matter, there is no easy experiment to disprove its existence and so it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity, which has worked extremely well for us for hundreds of years, is wrong.
We're going to have to find a new name for these dark matter aggregations, as they're definitely not galaxies. The root "gala" means "milk". Milk is white, and star-filled galaxies are generally whitish. Dark matter isn't.
This etymology lesson brought to you by the number 1 and the letter O.
Running another one of their Quagma experiments again.
Gonna get us all killed.
Perhaps the inhabitants of that galaxy don't want us accessing their sensitive data and have employed a matter firewall? Meanwhile we're like sitting ducks in the universe...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Even black holes emit light. What they are saying is that no visible radiation is being emitted.
Seriously, though.... Just because no light gets out doesn't mean no light is produced.
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Dark Matter is matter that cannot be directly detected through emitted radiation. But you can detect it through its effect on surrounding bodies. The effect is usually gravitational.
The concept of Dark Matter evolved from the "missing mass problem". You can estimate the amount of mass in a cluster of galaxies based on the motions of other objects around the object in question. When you compare this mass to the mass based on the total brightness (visible mass) of the galaxy, you can find a huge discrepancy. This is the "missing mass".
Wikipedia provides more information.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
> ark matter is just another word for "we have no idea"
I think you meant to say that you have no idea.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
hmm, dark matter galaxy, yeah, fascinating, whatever. I can't BELIEVE Apple isn't shipping iPod minis and photos without FireWire cables!!!!!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The preprint.
Not really.
Serious scientist DO say when they have no idea.
Dark matter indicates that there is a whole field of physics out there and that we're in the state of peaking through the keyhole atm, before opening the door. BTW, this is what the article states, just worded differently when it says something about starting to understand things.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Has anyone determined exactly what darkmatter is though? To me it sounds like simply matter that in its current state is not emiting any radiation. And, is not near a source that is emiting raiation of which the dark matter would reflect that radiation.
So basically, it's like a box in a dark room. If you look into that room, you don't see the box. But, if you shine a flashlight on it, the box will reflect that light back at you. Regular matter is the same thing, but there is a nearby radiation source (a lightbulb in the dark room), or the light matter is radiating on its own (the box itself is a lightbulb). The same applies to any other EM frequency, not just visible frequencies.
Nothing escapes the event horizon. Not even "invisible" radiation, whatever that is.
Black holes shine (at extremely high energies) because of the matter falling into the accretion disk. That traffic jam of matter that's fallen deep into a gravity well heats it up to phenomenal temperatures. The disks are part of what you might call a black hole system, but they are no more part of the black hole than the earth is part of the sun.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Now we know where all those lost socks end up.
12:50 - press return.
No, black holes by themselves do not emit light since nothing can escape from beyond the event horizon. The light is just a small part of a large range of electromagnetic radiation released by the black hole. This radiation comes from the accretion disk around a black hole, where matter that is spiralling into the black hole starts heating up immensely due to friction. Occasionally, matter escapes (from above the event horizon) in the form of bipolar acceleration jets. Scientists are not sure exactly why this happens.
The other form of radiation emitted by black holes is Hawking Radiation. Space is teeming with particle-antiparticle pairs that are constantly created and annhilated. In the vicinity of a black hole, one member of the pair can be sucked in (consequently annhilating its evil twin inside the black hole) while the other escapes. This gives the impression of the black-hole emitting radiation. Hawking came up with this theory when it was found that black-holes have temperature. That would seem preposterous since it means that the black hole was emitting energy, which it shouldn't.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
There are a few mistakes in your conjectures. First off, we're not talking about "a star". You would most likely not be able to make out a single star in such a remote galaxy unless it were astoundingly bright.
;-)
What this tells us is that the density of visible stars in that galaxy (assuming a normal distribution of magnitudes) is low enough that we cannot detect any of them. Someone else care to do the math and tell us what that density threshold is?
When you see "stars" in distant galaxies like Andromeda, what you're really seeing are clusters of stars, though perhaps modern technology has allowed us to resolve single very bright stars, I'm not sure.
As for something blocking our view... that's unlikely, as the dark galaxy was detected by viewing its hydrogen signature in radio wavelengths, so there's no problem seeing it in the correct wavelength.
Most likely (my untrained opinion), this is a galaxy composed of either very small stars or very old (burned out) stars. I'm sure there are good models for describing either. In the first case, for example, I would think that a low initial density of stellar material (mostly hydrogen) would lead to the formation of smaller-than-average stars.
What I think this observation proves is that galactic magnitudes can dip below our viewing threshold in the visible spectrum, and therefore any estimates of the mass of the universe based on visual surveys can be discounted. This makes the closed theory of universal expansion far more likely (e.g. that the universe will expand to a certain point, and then begin to contract until it collapses back into a singularity from which a new Big Bang would arise).
Ok, real astronomers ready your red ink!
That was either a lame attempt to troll people, or you decided now would be a really good time to hilight the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Regardless, so as not to confuse ignorant people as some religious goober will likely see this and go "heeeeeyyyyy yeaaaaaa", "dark matter" is a temporary name given to something that's having an effect we can see, even though we can't see what's actually driving the effect.
We're not saying 'ah yes, this must be what is here', we're saying 'well, something is there as evidenced by this, this, and this, but damn if I can tell you what, so I will call it "dark matter" until I can figure out what it really is'.
Whereas science will continue to try and resolve that open question, religion would just arbitrarily make up some assinine answer on the spot, declare itself completely and unquestionably correct, and then mock anyone who did something so silly as suggest that maybe they should have actually tried some observations and tests before coming to a conclusion.
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If >75% of the universe is dark matter, won't most galaxies be dark? Now that we've discovered that dark matter "galaxates", or whatever we do. Unless dark matter's physical properties are less galaxational...
--
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Who moderates the meta-moderators?
The article says something about "baryonic matter" and "non-baryonic matter", implying that dark matter is not just hard to see, but also exotic in it's basic structure. I wonder if they have some reason to suspect that.
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More detailed information can be found in the paper, which has been accepted for publication in a letter to the Astrophysical Journal.
Find it here.
It certainly is possible that "we don't know as much as we thought," but given what we do know, dark matter seems to be by far the most plausible.
First, it fits obervations well, and there is no particular reason to believe that we *can* see everything. There is certainly precedent (eg neutrinos).
While in themselves they are not reasonable candidates for dark matter, do we really have any strong observation evidence that the universe is not filled with iron basketballs? We certainly would have trouble seeing them directly... Iron basketballs aren't the only things we might miss, either.
Of course, there may both be dark matter and a misunderstanding of gravity.
As far as the cause of our difficulty being a misunderstanding of gravity, it seems unlikely: globular clusters do not show evidance of dark matter, but small compact dwarf galaxies do.
-Hil
Obligatory "farside" caption: "They knew they had the telescope pointed in the right direction, but forgot to remove the lenscap"
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
With all that Dark Matter, i bet all the inhabitants have Break Damage Limit equipped!
OH SNAP.
----------
somebody set up us the bomb.
"when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold"
I'm by no means that knowledgeable about physics/etc, but for your analogy to be accurate, wouldn't all this dark matter need to be completely boxed in as well? Surely if we can see stars/etc from so far away, then all that dark matter would be receiving some form of similar light and radiation which would be reflected and observable from our location.
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment
True, but before the Michelson-Morley experiment, it was impossiblet to disprove this fact. Until someone runs the "Richardson-O'Reilly" experiment, it'll be impossible to disprove dark matter too.
IANAA, but dark-matter sounds a bit like Tachyons, Anti-Time, and other Star Trekisms. But I hope it's true, I sure as hell don't want the universe imploding back in on itself.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Oh.
Of course, such light should have a good trace of gamma radiation when it reachs us, so can't be... but could have been something interesting to find.
The science fictions possiblilites are endless.
BTW Galaxy of Terror (1981) was a kind of cool flick.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
...our understanding of gravity, which has worked extremely well for us for hundreds of years...
Keep in mind that our understanding of gravity is that we have no clue what it is. However, our understanding of the effect of gravity has been working fine. The effect of gravity and gravity are two different things. It could very well be that there is absolutely no such thing as gravity and the effect of gravity is actually a side-effect multi-dimensional distortion, or subatomic radiation, or pure heavenly magic. That is why there is a 'theory of gravity' and a set of 'laws of the force of gravity'.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Looks to me like the King of all Cosmos is up to no good again.
They just changed their numbers, after the Paris Hilton "Shizzack".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is probably a simpler explanation:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org
If you read it all the way through you see that "Dark Matter" is just a hack to explain objects like this.
I'm wondering why this mysterious matter cannot be detected. Devoid of electrons, perhaps? Looking at the picture...this stuff isn't just dark, it's transparent. Have they tested this image for lensing? I dunno about you, but I find this all very creepy.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
But now we're veering into philosophy.
The biggest difference is that models of real objects using fairly simple models of dark matter can match observations very well while reasonable ones without it do not seem to. Tachyons etc. do not seem to be of any help in explaining anything.
Of course models that match observations may still be wrong, and we just haven't thought up the correct one yet, but in this case it seems unlikely.
-Hil
Congressman (skeptical): Well, I dunno...I don't really see anything there.
Astronomer: Oh, one moment...let me circle it for you!
Congressman: Yes, yes I see it!
Astronomer: Now I was wondering, Congressman...how much additional funding might we get for this discovery?
Congressman: Hm. I'm not sure we have additional funds for such an admittedly amazing find. Now, if you had TWO dark matter galaxies, we'd have something to discuss.
Astronomer (uncapping pen): Funny you should mention that...
where managers come from!
*BA-BOOM BING*
Thanks for coming out, enjoy the fish.
...with my tax return?
IRS Auditor: We've added up all of the income your employers have reported for you and it is much greater than what is reported on your tax form. How do you explain that.
Me: While you can usually detect income through tax forms, some types simply don't register. I believe that it is called...dark income.
IRS Auditor: I believe that it is called...tax evasion.
Me: gulp...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_eas t/4288633.stm
--- This
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0502312
Do you emit radiation? No? Then you're made of dark matter.
For great justice.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Once you go black, you never go back.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Some common objections to dark matter I constantly see whenever the topic comes up on Slashdot:
...
Can't dark matter just be brown dwarves or black holes or something? Why do scientists postulate crazy exotic invisible particles?
Dark matter is postulated to come in two kinds, Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). MACHOs are things like brown dwarves, etc.; WIMPs are the new kind of matter. We have already detected some MACHOs through gravitational microlensing experiments (looking for them by how they gravitationally deflect light). But if all the dark matter were MACHOs or something else mundane and baryonic, we would have detected more of them by now. That leaves WIMPs. Also, MACHOs and WIMPs have different physical properties (e.g., they cluster differently, and thus seed the formation of the large-scale galactic clusters we see today in different manners), and an all-MACHO universe doesn't cluster right, though it works out if you let some WIMPs into the mixture.
Ordinary neutrinos don't do the trick, either; we evidently need some new kind of particle. We don't know what WIMPs are, but some have postulated axions, neutralinos or other supersymmetric particles, WIMPZILLAs, solitons, sterile neutriono (that only interact gravitationally),
Dark matter is unscientific; it can't be tested or falsified.
Dark matter theories can be tested indirectly by observing the different predictions they make for galactic rotation curves, early-universe structure formation, cosmological expansion, etc. Already such observations have excluded a number of dark matter theories. And there are experiments underway that try to directly detect them, similarly to how we detect neutrinos.
Dark matter is just epicycles all over again, a fudge factor to preserve a wrong theory of gravity.
Once upon a time, irregularities were noted in the orbit of Uranus. It could have been postulated that the laws of gravity were wrong. Instead, it was postulated that an unseen bulk of matter was perturbing Uranus's orbit. Eventually, that bulk of matter was seen: the planet Neptune.
On the other hand, once upon a time, irregularities were noted in the orbit of Mercury. It was postulated that maybe a new planet caused them (Vulcan), but that turned out to be wrong; instead, a new theory of gravity was needed (general relativity).
The moral: you can attempt to explain away the observations with either dark matter or a new theory of gravity; both are scientifically valid approach. The problem with the latter is that it has proven extraordinarily difficult to produce a modified theory of gravity that is consistent with all observations, whereas there are dark matter theories that appear to do the job. Believe me, scientists don't ignore the possibility of a new theory of gravity any more than they ignore the possibility of a new type of matter; it's just that new theories of gravity don't seem to work as well as new theories of matter in explaining the observations.
What about MOND?
MOdified Newtonian Dynamics is the leading candidate for a non-dark matter alternative, modifying the laws of gravity. (Note that this page is by MOND's inventor, and may be biased.) However, it has had trouble with a number of observational tests; you can search the astro-ph arXiv for critiques of MOND. In particular, although it seems to work for galactic rotation curves, it's hard to get it to also work for cosmological expansion and structure formation. It's also very difficult to make it into a theory compatible with observed tests of relativity.
What about Bekenstein's MOND theory?
Bekenstein recently proposed a relativistic version of MOND called
We may be seeing a chunk of heavier elements but these are left over from the big bang.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Yeah, I don't think "look" is the right word here.
From the article "In the Virgo cluster of galaxies, they found a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun. The mysterious galaxy has been called VIRGOHI21."
But the first thing about Dark Matter is that it cannot be detected by it emitted radiation!!!
A real stealth galaxy. I wonder how big the cloaking device must be
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Now, real physicists, good physicists, will acknowledge (at least if you back them into a corner) that "dark matter" is not a concept of a real, existent *thing*. As in, we don't really have reason to believe in a magical material called "dark matter". The statement that "scientists have discovered a galaxy of dark matter" is kind of a wrong way of talking about it. Scientists have discovered that there equations don't work out quite right unless they suppose there's matter where they aren't detecting matter. So, if they assume that there's other undetectable matter somewhere in the area, doing certain things, our model works better.
However, poor physicists and science media people pick up on this and start imagining invisible planets populated by invisible people, and we get stories like, "scientists discover DARK MATTER!" You gotta love how these things are always phrased like that, too. It's never, "this particular scientist, Dr. Whateverhisnameis, has made certain readings and theorized bla-bla-bla." It's always "scientists" as a whole have "discovered" bla-bla-bla. Apparently, all scientists everywhere agree. "THEY" have "PROVED" bla-bla-bla as soon as someone somewhere makes some other reading that comes *close* to a value expected by the bla-bla-bla theory. So yadda-yadda-yadda, now geeks are standing around the water cooler trying to sound smart by talking about the invisible dark-matter planets.
To rectify this injustice, the master tapes to all seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager will be dumped there as soon as the copyright runs out.
>>dark matter is just another word for "we have no idea"
Wow, get a grip. 1), dark matter is not visible to the eye, but neither are x-rays. Invisible != Undetectable.
2), dark matter is not "all powerful." I can't even guess what you meant to imply. It's conjectured that dark matter exerts a force, not that it flies around like a genie granting wishes.
3), dark matter is just another word for "we found an anomaly, and our observations lead us to believe this model may explain that anomaly."
4) extra irony points for accusing science of using a "god of the gaps" approach because they discovered something new and put a name to it and are researching it. Clue on line 1, calling AC, clue on line 1.. please pick up.
Parent is a perfect example of reactionary political slop masquerading as relevant opinion. I sure hope the AC was just trolling, because if that's genuine ignorance, I fear for the future of our species. One redeeming quality though.. I'm sure our friend the AC didn't realize this, but implying that dark matter is a foil for ignorance by comparing it to god (can't see but it is there and its all powerful, honestly !) implies that the AC thinks god is a foil for ignorance. (I know he didn't use the word "god" explicitly, but what else could he be referring to? Root? :) doesn't fit.)
Once again an offtopic comment with no redeeming intellectual or informational value is modded +interesting by conservative mods who just want to rub their creationist, anti-rationalist views in the face of a technocratic forum. Mod parent down, down doobee down, doo wa.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/malevich/b_circ le.jpg.html
See down there in left corner! Liers!
Since the speed of sound is much less than the speed of light it's not surprising that we can see it before it has had a chance to do God's bidding.
This could form the basis for an interesting experiment, if we could correlate the locations and times of various bits of Gods universe being lit up we could deduce his location and maybe set off on a journey to meet up with him.
maybe not visible radiation...
"Maggie call Aquaman!!!"
The astronomers say it is hard to study the universe's dark, hidden objects because of the Earth's proximity to the Sun
So why isnt there a project to send a telescope to the edge of the solar system and a couple of other space relays to send the photos back to us?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
According to the article, the object in question does, in fact, contain plenty of baryonic matter. In fact, it contains 100 million solar masses of hydrogen - that's how it was detected.
Why hasn't this gravitationally bound collection of hydrogen (plus possibly nonbaryonic other stuff) collapsed to form significant numbers of stars? Isn't this really bizarre?
The black hole is essentially converting virtual particles into real ones -- without the presence of the black hole the radiation would not be emitted, so I don't see how it is wrong to say that the black hole is emitting radiation.
My understanding is that Dark Matter does not interact electromagnetically, so it neither reflects nor absorbs light.
I'm not sure that's the right way of saying it. Ether is a very old idea intended to deal with a couple questions. For example, what is there in "empty space". It's sometimes used as a term in natural philosophy and is actually not necessarily intended, in concept, to be a physical material in the sense that we think of "matter", but has been supposed to be a whole lot of different things.
That having been said, there was a time when people tried to use the concept of ether to explain the behavior of light. They supposed that light was nothing other than waves passing through this "ether", which they believed was some sort of a physical material. This idea had many problems, but one of the benefits of this explanation was that it would explain why light traveled at a constant speed. Imagining light as wave in a medium was also useful in understanding many behaviors of light, including refraction, reflection, and the famous double-slit experiment.
OK, so it was supposed that light's constant speed was a result of passing through ether that was stationary, and the speed that a wave travels can be determined through certain aspects of the medium, including rigidity of the particles and distance between particles and such. So if ether was the medium of light, and therefore the speed of light was constant through the medium (relative to the medium), then we would be able to determine how fast we're moving, relative to the motion of the medium, by careful measurements of the speed of light. This was the intention of the Michelson-Morely experiment.
However, what the Michellson-Morley experiment demonstrated was that light's constant speed was constant *regardless* of the context of the observer. In essence, the medium would need to be stationary to everyone all the time, no matter what their velocity was. What this proved was not that "there was no ether", but that explaining light as waves in ether was *insufficient* to explain the consistency of the speed of light.
Here is the accepted Astrophysical Journal Letter regarding this discovery.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0502312
(Note: Be on guard for confusing astronomical conventions, like measuring almost everything logrithmically with decreasing numbers representing increasing brightnesses.)
To sum up: Astronomers discovered a large mass of rotating Hydrogen gas towards the Virgo Cluster. From the gas dynamics they were able to estimate the mass of the system, and found it to be comparible to the mass of a galaxy. When they went to look at the optical light given off by stars, they found they couldn't find nearly the amount they should for a normal galaxy, hence the 'star-less galaxy' title.
Current Cold Dark Matter (CMD) models of galaxy formation predict that these 'star-less' masses of dark matter should exist in the universe. While other candidates have been discovered in the past, this is the only (currently) viable candidate now known. If it holds up to subsequent analysis, it will provide observational support for the CDM formation models.
A few quick points --
- Dark matter is simply non-luminous matter (matter that does not emit light at any wavelength).
- Yes, black holes are a form of dark matter (baryonic).
- No, this is not an 'anti-matter' galaxy.
- Current Dark Matter theories lean towards it having a non-baryonic source (i.e. not being made up of 'normal' matter).
Furthermore, Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. In order for the amount of Hawking radiation to exceed the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the black hole must have a mass significantly less than our sun. A super-massive black hole would emit a miniscule fraction of the CMB, and hence would be black for all intents and purposes.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Photons (light) do not possess charge. The photon has no antiparticle (or, you could say, it is its own antiparticle). It is a 'real neutral particle', with zero spin, electromagnetic charge, weak charge and strong charge.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Actually Dark Matter has been seen visually. In fact there were recent claims that it's existance was "proven" by visual inspection correllating to the already observed gravitational effects and predicted existance.
How?
By observing supernova. The immense amount of light given off by a super novae explosion actually illuminates this "Dark Matter" which is merely diffuse hydrogen uneavenly spread throughout the universe and allows us to actually see parts of it for a small period of time. "Proving" the existance of Dark Matter is one of the many things the Hubble is credited with being responsible for.
There have also been many other forms of indirect evidence that have all pointed to the same conclusion over the past 2-3 years.
The certainty of the existance and the makeup of what Dark Matter is made a giant leap in the confidence level in recent years and can be talked about with a lot more certainty that you are giving it.
Now as to the subject of Dark Energy...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The Death Star doesn't put off much light.
As in "How long does it take for a management chain to pass the blame"
Stop pulling arbitrary "answers" to phenomena you don't understand out of your ass and calling them "Truth" and I'll stop mocking you for being a clueless dolt.
If you can't tell the difference between fact and fairy tale, that's not my problem, and I'm tired of so many religious people trying to MAKE it my problem. Stay out of my life and (had I any children) my children's lives and I'll stay out of yours.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
"... This galaxy, dubbed VIRGOHI21 is rotating like a real galaxy, at speeds only explainable through massive amounts of matter, thought no single visible star could be detected."
You thought wrong.
Why am I on Slashdot? I'm bored. Why am I bored? I'm on Slashdot.
The dark matter at the heart of astrophysical research is not diffuse hydrogen, but something more exotic. Hydrogen is not sufficient to account for the phenomena dark matter is invoked to explain.
Dark galaxy? Did they perhaps find this:t .html
http://www.candydirect.com/bars/Milky-Way-Midnigh
huh? you define gravity as the singular instance of an apple falling? It seems perhaps you're using a definition of the word that doesn't correspond to common usage. Most people consider gravity to be a universal force that causes each particle of matter to attract every other particle of matter in a relationship corresponding to the mass of the particles and the inverse square of the distance between them. According to Newtonian physics, which was where the concept was originally formulated, this would result in an Apple falling, roughly, from your hand towards the earth, given that the Earth is the most massive and closest body around.
However, a singular instance of an apple traveling toward the earth, or even a thousand instances, is insufficient demonstration that "gravity exists".
Hmm, fair enough. I haven't really read up on the subject too far. Mostly I just didn't think the OP's analogy fit very well. I suppose it might fit if there actually is some type of energy the dark matter would reflect. I just have a hard time believing no energy of that type would already be reaching the dark matter, given all the supernovas/etc in the universe.
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
We're not saying 'ah yes, this must be what is here', we're saying 'well, something is there as evidenced by this, this, and this, but damn if I can tell you what, so I will call it "dark matter" until I can figure out what it really is'.
While not following a strict orthodox religious view, your above statement defines my belief of God quite adequately:
We're not saying 'ah yes, this must be what is here', we're saying 'well, something is there as evidenced by this, this, and this, but damn if I can tell you what, so I will call it "God" until I can figure out what it really is'.
Half the leptons.
Same great taste!*
Light galaxies.
*The photons sorta shine out your fourth point of contact. Minimal interaction.
emt 377 emt 4
Maybe they just have a galaxy-cloaking device, they don't want visitors.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
Perhaps it is a time-reversed galaxy. So, instead of emitting photons, it absorbs them.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment
Like interpretations of so many classic physics experiments taught in high school and college, that interpretation is somewhat simplistic. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the observed speed of light did not depend on the state of motion of the observer.
That does exclude simple models in which light propagates exactly analogous to sound. But it excludes few other models. In particular, there are models of an "aether" that can account for those observations, and Lorentz actually believed in those when he developed the equations that form the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity. People just didn't adopt that view because Einstein's explanation seemed simpler.
I think I'll stick to AC comments.
Mostly random stuff.
The question is, once we account for all the "normal matter", will we have enough "normal matter" to account for the gravitational effects we see (according to our current understanding of gravity). Many scientists say, according to their estimates, no, which then still requires a place-holder of "dark matter". However, in this sense, rather than "dark matter", we might call it, "that unknown thing which we don't know what it is but somehow causes these unexplained gravitational effects". Or maybe we could all it, "WTF?! matter". "Dark matter" sounds catchier, though.
The galaxy is so new that the light from the stars hasn't reached earth yet. That could be fun.
The previous poster. But it doesn't matter.
No, that is way, way wrong. Even taking interstellar hydrogen into account leaves 80+% of the matter unexplained.
TFA says this object is "a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun."
It may be unusual that none of this hydrogen has ignited in a fusion reaction, but that doesn't change the fact that hydrogen atoms are baryonic matter, quite common here on earth. (There are quadrillions of them in my body right now.)
Later, TFA says "according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than the ordinary (baryonic) matter that makes up everything we can see and touch."
So this object is "dark" in the sense that it doesn't emit visible light, but it's not Dark Matter.
Or am I missing something here?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Still seeing only "clusters" of stars? Check out this view from our old friend Hubble!
This image and the TERAbytes of data like it that have been collected over such a short time are testimony to why losing Hubble is going to be such a tragedy -- whether or not we understand or accept the reasons it's going to happen.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Hey, it was the OP's opinion that scientists have "no idea" what it is, whereas TFA gives no mention. In fact they have some idea, so it's not just guessing. Dark matter's primary characteristics are 1) that is does not shed radiation in the spectrum visible to humans, and 2) it has mass, evidenced by its gravity / rotational speed -- just like visible matter. I guess that makes it both "dark", and "matter".
Plus, if he RTFA, he'd note that it was actually detected by radiotelescope, so there is no question about its existence. So, yeah, it was a really lame attempt to troll.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
All this talk of light and dark is making me think that the universe is one big experiment in racism. Why can't we have fuschia-years or mauve-matter?
ObTopic: no one wants to lend credence to the "below our threshold for detection" statement that someone else posted earlier? It may be possible that the stars are simply too dim...no?
I cracked it! All this "dark matter" is actually space craft that are using cloaking devices. Duh.
They should call this galaxy the "Romulan Galaxy" just on principle. Show some respect to our cloaked overlords.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
No, that's absolutely incorrect. When scientists talk about dark matter they really do mean some actual stuff, not just a problem with gravity. We do have plenty of reason to believe in this magical material (too many for me to list here in fact, short list of acronym soup: BBN, CMB, LSS).
There are quite a few models for what dark matter could be, many motivated by our theories of particle physics.
If you want to learn more, here is an excellent review on the subject, written at a very basic level.
Essentially all you need is a massive particle with a very low probability of reaction (cross section). There are people who are trying to use techniques similar to neutrino detection to find evidence of actual dark matter particles (come back in 5-10 years and we may have detected dark matter particles).
We may also be able to see gamma rays from dark matter particle annihilation at the center of our galaxy, or at the centers of dwarf satellite galaxies (the Milky way may be difficult, the signal would be higher, but you also have confusion with other high-energy sources).
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
PS I'd love to do a poll among random people on your "Most people consider gravity to be..." statement to see how many actually agree. I certainly don't thing that the facts that (1) gravity effects every type of matter and (2) gravity follows an inverse square law are actually built into the meaning of the word 'gravity'. For example someone might find a type of particle that doesn't attract other particles and that wouldn't force us to change our usage of the word. Sure, physicists would have a bit of work to do but even they would probably continue to call gravity 'gravity'.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I know a Romulan Bird of Prey using a cloaking device when I see one.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Don't confuse people with the religion they practice. Bear in mind that Copernicus was scared to death of the church and wouldn't come out with his actual findings, one of his friends had to do it for him after he died. When Giordano Bruno not only pushed them publically, but suggested that other worlds and life may exist somewhere off of earth, he was tried by church and burned alive. Galileo was tortured and tried and forced to renounce his belief in Copernican theories for going against the church's geocentric view of the universe.
Further, bear in mind that Isaac Newton lived at a time when the church was under greater state control than was typical throughout its history and even received special treatment from the Church of Englad (courtesy of the King) such as the decree - still in effect today, currently on Stephen Hawking - that the Lucasian professor need not take Holy Orders, something nobody else can do. Furthermore, Newton's findings on gravitational fields did not directly challenge any particular belief held by the church.
The notion that science benefits significantly from religion is idiotic. It suggests in a subtle manner that the reason scientists succeed is that they're given baseless conclusions to smash, but that's not the case. Copernicus didn't go looking to beat up the Ptolemic model for the universe and didn't even want to accept his own findings. Galileo didn't go looking to beat up the Geocentric model of the universe. Einstien even rejected some of his discoveries - which are now turning out to be accurate to varying degress - with the famous quip "god doesn't play dice".
Religion is a crutch for people who want to know the "why" of something but don't want to go to all the trouble of following the "how" backwards long enough to get a real answer. People wouldn't be religious if they were clear, critical thinkers because the idea of making non-time-sensitive judgements on faith is an absurd thing born of ignorance and fear. Taking on religious beliefs is like wandering around in the dark and coming to a pit in the floor. Religious people would just back up and take a running jump not know how wide or deep it. Smart people would run some tests like dropping pebbles into it to depth test and trying to determine the width before they jumped. Rare is the case where you'd be forced to simply jump on faith and not be stupid for doing so such as, for example, because you are being chased by a wild animal or something.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I can't think of any religion that has one or more gods and doesn't define them as some manner of supernatural being. So, no, assuming you're not talking about some niche religion, cult, or your own personal beliefs, it's not the same and doesn't adequately define the TYPICAL view of "god".
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
You're right. Obviously the astronomers involved made all this stuff up. They haven't got a preprint of a their report to Astrophysics Journal posted on the web, or anything like that. And popular science journalists would never try to get cute with the pictures they choose to go with their articles. I mean that just doesn't happen.
Though the BBC is a reputable source and usually gets their facts straight, they're not to be mistaken for a peer-reviewed journal. A two-hundred-word article isn't going to have a full complement of figures and supporting data--and it shouldn't be expected to.
Mods--the parent post is funny at best; not insightful. I have this amusing mental image of a bunch of drunk astronomers drawing random circles on star charts and saying, "Okay, this week we'll tell them there's dark matter here. Suckers."
~Idarubicin
No, hey, that's pretty good analysis based on the scant information in the article. I'd need more to be sure myself. Presumably they've done very deep imaging and think they ought to have seen the stars in a galaxy of this mass, if they were there, and don't. But this is a relatively low mass for a galaxy, and such dwarf galaxies are notoriously difficult to make out. There are some good people at Cardiff, and if they're making a fuss out of this they've probably got a pretty good case, but I'd want to read the refereed journal article to better understand the limits.
You're last point is off the mark, however. Our best estimates for the universal mass density don't depend on optical observations at all (rather microwave background), and are very robust against missing faint/dark matter. The closed universe/collapse model, based on our current best understanding is dead, dead, dead. Only something very surprising about the time evolution of dark energy would seem to be able to alter this conclusion.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
How 'bout you enlighten us. What is dark matter?
Sounds more like you have no idea what you're talking about.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
First off, someone please mod up the parent. Good reply, and I bow to obvious facts that contradict my statement.
However, your point about hubble is mis-placed. Hubble can't resolve this kind of image any better than ground-based AO scopes at this point (not because the atmosphere poses no obsticle, but because AO allows better than default resolution, and technology has advanced since Hubble was sent up).
As others have pointed out to me here on Slashdot, the reason that Hubble is useful is that certain wavelengths simply don't get through our atmosphere, so while pictures like the one you link to could be taken from the ground today, a great deal of research cannot.
Personally, I'd love to see a ground-based scope on the far side of the moon to replace hubble, but I'm probably just dreaming.
There is both baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter. Astronomers distinguish between the two types, and try to study/understand both. We don't know what the major non-baryonic dark matter is, but we know some of its properties (how it clumps on various scales), and we know it doesn't readily interact with baryonic matter. There are candidate particles. Neutrinos apparently have a mass, and likely make up a small fraction of it, but for the most part, no, we don't know what it is.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
There is even a school of thought that says without Christianity a lot of Scientific discoveries would have been a really late in coming
Like heliocentricism, for example? Oh, wait.. wrong way round, the church battled that one for 300 years, finally pardoning Galileo for his 'crimes' in 1992.
How about evolution.. oh, wait, no.. the fundamentalists and literalists won't have any of that.
Okay, how about something really simple - the lightning conductor. Oh, no, wait.. churches originally considered lightning conductors blasphemy as they attempted to counter god's will - some went as far as to blame them for earthquakes.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
So where is the false color image of this galaxy?
The availability or otherwise of a false color image reflects only on how the researchers chose to present their data; has no bearing whatsoever on the existence of the galaxy. In this particular case, it would in fact be unusual to present a false color image, since radio data are more commonly illustrated using contour maps.
How do they know it's rotating like a galaxy?
From the radio observations, which pick up 21cm emission from cold, neutral hydrogen gas. Doppler shifts of the 21cm line allow them to establish a rotation curve for the galaxy.
They haven't shown any sort of evidence of the real matter they claim to have detected.
No, in fact they have presented evidence for the real matter (neutral hydrogen), in the form of the 21cm emission.
To post a picture of empty space and say it's full of dark matter is just stupid.
No, it's quite significant: based on the radio emission, we would expect a population of stars, that would show up in the optical image. The actual absence of these stars, as evidenced by the 'empty space', is the whole reason that this is news.
I think the only dark matter this article shows is in the astronomers head.
By totally misunderstanding every aspect of the story, you have effctively stood up in front of the /. community, and loudly proclaimed 'I'm dumb as shit'. Congratulations.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
They don't even have a Starbucks.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
> it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity,
> which has worked extremely well for us for hundreds of years
You exaggerage -- significantly. Until Newton, one of the prevailing ideas
was that gravity drew everything in the universe toward one central point.
(This goes back to Aristotle, if not further...) I _suppose_ you could call
Newton "hundreds of years ago", but it's not very many hundreds. Quite aside
from that, our understanding of gravity has been revised significantly in the
last hundred years; Newton's basic equation is still more-or-less correct, but
it doesn't explain everything or cover all of the edge cases; furthermore, it
doesn't work at all at the particle level.
Our _basic_ understanding of gravity is _basically_ correct, but there is
definitely still stuff about gravity that we don't know or understand.
As for "dark matter", there's dark matter and then there's dark matter. This
particular discovery is far enough away that it's not terribly hard to explain;
we'd only be able to "see" it if it were radiating light, so it could
_potentially_ be perfectly ordinary matter that just doesn't happen to
be doing that. Perhaps it's not grouped up into stars the way the matter
here is, for instance -- a ring of roughly uniform density, or something
along those lines.
Or it could be something else. Point is, we don't know.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Now we know where Samus kept popping off to through those damned portals.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
That's right. Observations of our own Milky Way galaxy, which we have good limits on the normal baryonic dark matter, is dominated gravitationally by something more exotic, and a lot of it. The best limits on the amount of baryonic matter and non-baryonic matter in the universe come from WMAP. There's about six times as much non-baryonic dark matter out there as there is normal stuff. These results are well supported by many other observatoins (e.g., light element abundances, galactic rotation curves, cluster mass estimates, etc.).
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I'm sorry if I sound aggressive. I'm not dismissing the idea of the supremacy of Christianity as an ideology altogether, I just find it very, very arrogant that someone would support that without extremely good scientific proof.
The grandparent didn't express his views with good manners, I'll give you that - but the core idea of his post is still true: The church has through the years made up 'truths' and tried suppress scientific research that tests those 'truths'. Isaac Newton or other christian scientists might have believed in the scientific method, but it seems that the church as an entity does not...
As far as a scientist is concerned, gravity is only an explanation of effects. Consider atoms: To a scientists, atoms "exist" insofar as the idea of atoms allows correct predictions about effects we observe in the physical world (from chemistry to the signal from a electron microscope). As you claim, the theory of gravity (currently General Relativity) allows us to make good predictions about the physical world, so a scientist can say "gravity exists". It doesn't make a lot of sense to treat it differently in that respect from the other fundemental forces.
Now, you may be addressing some metaphysical idea of existence, that is seperate from effects on the physical world. I just want to be clear that that is quite separate from the question of whether gravity exists in the scientific sense, to which the answer must be yes. Of course, the weird thing about the scientific notion of existence is that new data may show us that something actually does not have quite the properties we thought or that only something that approximates it actually exists. In the case of gravity, we know that there must be corrections to the way we understand it now in order to account for quantum effects, but the most reasonable way to view this is then to say that gravity exists, but we don't entirely understand the nature of it yet.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Yeah, but Hawking radiation is negligible in big black holes, and not something astronomers observe. Radiation associated with massive astronomical black holes is completely dominated by surrounding accretion processes.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
a decaffeinated galaxy??
What I find most interesting about the "dark galaxy" is that it's got plenty of hydrogen but it somehow has not managed to form stars.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Mod Parent -1: In need of medication
Random question--
I recently read this idea that the universe might be curved back on itself...that light that seems to be from a "long long long way away" might actually be from "here", but a long time ago. Is there any evidence for or against the universe being a closed system like that? Is this idea taken seriously by anyone of repute?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
This is a good point - it's quite possible we don't understand gravity (especially in the case of dark energy!). However, there turns out to be a lot of evidence for dark matter (galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing, structure formation, the microwave background, etc.), and it turns out that it's hard to come up with a model without dark matter that explains all of these observations. Dark matter is, in a very real sense, the simplest interpretation of this data. There are some earlier posts of mine (and otheres) that talk about this evidence in more detail.
This observation, if confirmed, could be one of the best evidences yet that dark matter is real, physical "stuff". Visible galaxies and clusters form in the middle of large dark matter halos, which act as "seeds". Cosmologists have always predicted that there should be some population of these halos that never accumulate enough visible stuff to be visible. The discovery of such a "dark halo" is a fairly impressive confirmation of the theory. It's possible to believe that gravity can be modified to change rotation velocities in a galaxy, but it's hard to imagine such a modification producing effects where no real matter exists!
1) You definitely wouldn't see single stars. We'd see only the integrated light from a whole population of stars.
2) The numbers are already done for us. From the paper: 'We conclude that there is no optical counterpart to VIRGOHI21 down to a B-band surface-brightness limit of 27.5 B mag/arcsec^2. This is less than 1 solar luminosity pc^-2, giving a maximum luminosity in stars of less than 10^8 solar luminosities if a diameter of 16 kpc is assumed.'
3) M31 isn't far away at all. In fact, its the closest large galaxy to the MW. HST can resolve individual stars there, allowing us to measure the brightnesses and construct helpful "colour-magnitude diagrams" for instance.
4) No. Read the paper. They argue that the low surface density of gas prevents fragmentation of hte gas, and hence stars not forming.
5) This is total crap.
So would an invisible gas like hydrogen be a candidate?
http://saveie6.com/
Parents point of view is not the most common, but that doesn't make him a troll.
read.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
The closed universe/collapse model, based on our current best understanding is dead, dead, dead. Only something very surprising about the time evolution of dark energy would seem to be able to alter this conclusion.
I'd really like to read more about this and why it's dead. Are there other plausible theories that wikipedia.org does not mention?
I've read the scientific abstract now. They've indeed got something interesting here. There ought to be a substantial galaxy here to be seen, and they've looked hard for it down to a sufficiently faint level, and don't see it. Pretty cool!
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Does anyone else find it ironic that the Cheshire radio telescope found something that cannot be seen?
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
Wasn't there some strange theories based on string theory that explain dark matter?
I remember reading it a few years ago on here. Basically time and space is warped and wrapped in layers like a folded piece of fabric. When light or energy passes through the folds the wave length slightly shifts. This would explain the inaccuracies of the readings which astronomers believe are dark matter.
http://saveie6.com/
Well, in many forms of religion, it more or less comes down to a recognition of forces and powers that are beyond your understanding. If by "being" you mean "something which is" and by "supernatural" you mean "beyond the purview of human knowledge/understanding", then I suppose what you say is true. Religions tend to talk about "supernatural beings". However, this is not the same as indicating that all religions talk about super-heros that live in the sky on clouds, telling us what to do and judging our actions.
So, no, assuming you're not talking about some niche religion, cult, or your own personal beliefs, it's not the same and doesn't adequately define the TYPICAL view of "god".
I think by "typical" you're indicating "prominent" and "widely publicized". However, part of that is because religions and religious people without highly-defined and judgmental super-hero-type gods, first of all, they don't have highly-structured rules and belief-systems, which means they aren't monolithic. It's easier to talk about what Catholics believe than it is to talk about what gnostics/Buddhists believe, since with Catholics you can pretty much cite the pope as an authority, but gnostics won't agree and there is no authority.
Further, the groups that get the most press and will impress you as most clearly "religious" are the vocal/noisy/imposing ones. The ones who are the sort you're annoyed with. They'll go on TV and tell you you're evil for whatever. It's the religious nuts who blow up abortion clinics and World Trade Centers that get on the news as representing "religious action". They guy down the street who gave to the poor and turned the other cheek, but goes silently about his business without even telling you that he did these things from faith, he's not getting on the news.
The fact is, there are religions that are less definitive, more fluidly practiced, and don't bother to try to convince you. Religious people of this sort are not-at-all uncommon, but they won't necessarily talk to you about it, since they aren't trying to win followers. They especially won't talk to you about it if your the sort of person who goes around complaining about how stupid religious people are.
So while I understand that you're unaccustomed to recognizing religious except when it's prominent, monolithic, and offensive to you, I don't see why that means all the other religious-types out there are necessarily a-typical. Maybe they're just not obvious.
Achk, but this is all off-topic anyhow.
There's some information from the public WMAP webpage here. You might also look at Wayne Hu's excellent webpages here. Start with the intructory materials and move up from there. It has only been in the last couple of years that we've been finally confident about the values of the cosmological parameters and that the universal geometry is flat. The dark matter and dark energy both are still confusing, to be sure, but the picture of the fundamental nature (age, curvature, etc.) of the universe is pretty solid at this point.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I, for one, welcome our dark matter overlords.
You, sir, have made my week.
Thanks.
You can observe this yourself. Check out the night view, and note the nearly round voids out there. You don't even need a telescope.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Sadly, it appears that VIRGOHI21 was a casualty of the Photino Bird's campaign against baryonic matter.
I hope someone gets the reference.
Nope. No number N would be sufficient. Apples going towards earth could be explained by some law that makes apples go towards earth. There were ancient theories that talked about tendencies either "downward" or "toward the center", neither of which were really gravity, especially when considered this tendency was paired-with/opposed-by a tendency that forced things into circular motion. The sheer fact of apples moving towards the ground, even if we wanted an explanation for why apples *always* go toward the ground, could be explained by a law that "apples are attracted to ground". That's not gravity.
When people talk about gravity, whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, they are referring to the universal gravitation from Newton's theories of physics. For it to be gravity, it requires more than that apples attract ground, it requires that matter attracts matter, and it requires the sort of rules that comprehend the fact that the pull of the sun is less of an influence than the pull of the earth (which has to do with distance) and the fact that the earth pulls the apple greater than your hand does (which requires mass).
If they're talking about "things go down", well, in fact, that is not the same as gravity. Part of the reason things go down, after all, is air-pressure. You know, not everything goes down. Helium balloons go up, planes go up, and birds go up.
sorry, wrong again. HI, as defined and used by every astronomer on the planet, it neutral hydrogen. That's a H with a roman I next to it. HII is ionised hydrogen (H+ to chemists). H_2 is molecular hydrogen.
It was easy to disprove the existence of aether with the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Have you seen the experimental apparatus for detecting gravity waves? It's almost the same experiment, just to a much greater precision. Thanks to scientific progress, we'll call it "gravity waves" instead of "ether waves" when the speed of light is seen to be different in orthagonal directions. I find it very amusing. (Yeah, yeah, the theory is a lot better, but you have to admit it's funny.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This "new" galaxy, how old is it really? It's hard to tell, but a perfectly valid question, since if it is possible to detect it's age I wouldn't be surprised if it is going to be older than Big Bang.
Why? - Well, if we scale down Big Bang to firework size (Think of those spherical explosions you see in fireorks.) If one explodes before another you will see the stars of the first one first, but even though the stars has stopped glowing, the particles remains. Figure that "our" Big Bang isn't the only one that has occured.
What if this galaxy is the remains of some Big Bang that occured much much earlier than about 13 billion years ago. (give or take a few :-) ) This will put some theories completely upside down. Are we going to have a new Big Bang, and in that case when?
This discovery is at least one example of the situation where reality is stranger than fiction. (I haven't seen any story based on the idea of a galaxy completely of dark matter.)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The problem isn't that everyone who is religious has a closed mind; there are religious people with open minds (even more now that it won't get your burned for heresy). The problem is that some people, who are *very* closed minded use religion as an excuse to believe- or not believe - arbitrary things. I can't say for sure whether these bottom of the barrel "I'm right no matter what" types are products of religion or are merely drawn to it, but I can say that they annoy me, that they fester unchecked in many places, and that they successfully supplant knowledge of reality with fantasy and falsehood to further their agendas.
>>That'a matter for discussion but Religion most certainly does not mean an automatic close minded approach.
True enough in an academic sense, but in the US at least, church and politics are closely tied, and "faith" is frequently used to close people's minds to one thing and/or focus their minds on another thing. I'm not by this saying that religion exists only for that purpose (real religion is imho not about that) but that in practice, it happens, and in my experience, a lot all the time.
>>There is even a school of thought that says without Christianity a lot of Scientific discoveries would have been a really late in coming. Since it's largely respobsible for driving out superstion in a lot of cultures.
Drove out superstition? So, leprechauns are superstition, but angels aren't? Looks to me like christianity replaced one superstition with another. Christianity may (for the sake of argument) be a more advanced form of superstition than faeries and elves and dwarves, but it's still not literal. One may be able to "interpret" religion to find guidance with your life, but the literal view is blatantly superstitious. How is one god better than 10? How are two magical, hidden worlds more real than ghosts walking this world? Sorry to have to ask you that, but I find it outrageously foolish to state that today's religion is less absurd than yesterday's just because the flavor changed.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
There quite a few theories of what dark matter could be, along with the theory that we're just wrong about gravity. What experiment could be performed to distinguish between these theories? If you understand the current science, please do explain.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Stars orbiting faster than Newtownian gravity as tested with the planets going round our sun suggests they should is a pretty strongly evidenced and testable (just look through your telescope) effect. I haven't seen anything like that which suggests the existence of anything I'm inclined to call "God".
I am trolling
...that dolphins are unintelligent. It merely raises questions about the intelligence of the other creatures involved.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Okay, this week we'll tell them there's dark matter here. Suckers."
Well, the GPP does have a point, even if it's the BBC that flubbed it. Make with the cool pictures if you want more funding, Mr Scientist Man!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Just look at any major religion's response to any challenge to its sacred writings. I cannot think of a single religion which does not claim that its sacred text(s) is absolutely correct, and if something disagrees with them then it's the universe which must be wrong.
I am trolling
It would be much more efficient to construct a single Dyson Sphere over the entire galaxy. It would also be a lot more aesthetic, as the view would be rotating.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So, is the term baryons short for "Barry Manilons", a physics concept inspired by the famous singer/songwriter? It would explain much about Life, the Universe and Everything.
Earth is pre-Type I; Sagan apparently calculated us at about 0.7 on the Kardashev Scale.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
It's not invisible at radio frequencies. Actually, what the astronomers observed was exactly hydrogen. If it had been invisible (in the more general sense), they would not have observed it. It was the movement of that hydrogen which convinced them that there's something else which they do not observe, except through its effect on the hydrogen motion.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I question it to the extent I simply don't believe in it. I think the Israeli explanation that gravity falls off slower than one over r squared at big distances is more likely, and the Pioneer anomalies give it some support. Much as I hate to lose the first ever universal law, I think this makes more sense.
I am trolling
There are some really pathetic mods out there. This is probably the most insightful post that will appear on Slashdot today.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
"Oh My God, it's *not* so full of stars!!!"
Ahhh now we get to the point. Organized Religious groups do indeed at times act in a way that ignores fact and destroys progress. However many of those heroes of science you just mentioned pursued their studies because of their faith. They believed God created the world to be understandable. So they strove to understand it. Religion is not synonymous with religious buraucracy. I really have a problem with people who dismiss a theory from someone because they come from a religious background. They have just as much a right to test your theories and challenge your beliefs as you do theirs. Dogmatic statements like "Religion is a crutch for people who want to know the "why" of something but don't want to go to all the trouble of following the "how" backwards long enough to get a real answer." Just demonstrate that you have a prejudice against religious people. Regardless of whether they can back up their claim or not.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
You've just describe the scientific method, which I'm sure is useful for some readers, but I was hoping for somehting a little deeper. :)
Are there then models of dark matter which specify how the non-baryonic particles were formed, and how they come to be distributed, without the freedom to simply arrange the particles however you need to to make the numbers work out? Any links to descriptions of said theories?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My God, it's full of... no, wait, not really... oh well...
The pro-religious posters on /. don't bring up these "scientific" errors, why do stubborn pro-science folks bring up layman religion that has nothing to do with real religion?
(\(\
(^.^) INFECTED
(")")
By physical definition, "dark matter" refers to any baryonic or non-baryonic media that attributes to undetected gravitational masses surrounding galaxies and filling our Universe. So if there are a large number of isolated black holes that have not been detected, they may have some contribution to "dark matter" per se. It doesn't have to be BHs, either. It could well be Jupitar-size planets that are considered "dark matter" in this sense.
The other night upon the stair,
I saw a star that wasn't there.
It wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish it'd go away...
This would qualify as a Kardashev Type III civilization.
But don't suggest this to the astronomers or astrophysicists because they are so friggen sure that the universe is *dead* and nothing they observe could be explained by the activity of advanced technological civilizations... They obviously haven't read any of the work by the Lineweaver group pointing out that 75% of the stars in the galactic habitable zone are older (in some cases much older) than the Sun. [Ref: astro-ph/0401024].
Roll the open source and nanotechnology development efforts forward by a few hundred million years and project what the universe would look like...
Every time science studies something, someone somewhere plays it up that science is ignorant and backwards because "those scientists are now finding out that they don't know everything". Which is idiocy for several reasons, but this article isn't about religion so they're offtopic.
>>...would you argue with that. I mean, loosely, that's the deal, right? In other words, we don't know.
Loosely, I would say that you have oversimplified two important facts out of your summary in order to fit your bias. Fact 1 is that we can indeed detect dark matter, the motion of matter in space as if there were matter which is not optically visible, it how we detect it. Fact 2, which is subtle, is that the "unknown phenomena" wasn't named "dark matter" arbitrarily. They didn't come up with the name and then create the theory - they came up with the theory based on the data, and then named it. Your version implies that the scientists applied the name without any idea whether or not it was relevant. But the reality is the opposite - they came up with a theory to explain the phenomena, THEN named it.
You're pushing to dismiss the concept of dark matter on the grounds that it's unconfirmed. Because it's unconfirmed, I fully understand that you may wish to attribute the phenomena to other causes. That's your prerogative. But there's no disproof of the theory so far, so whether or not I believe it, saying that it's "wrong" is unsupported.
Do we know? You didn't specify the subject of our knowledge. Do we know that there are places in space where the matter we know and understand to 9 significant figures acts differently than we expect it to? Yes, we know that. Do we know how to synthesize this phenomena in a lab? That we do not know. But your original implication that we "have no idea" what's going on is incorrect. And you seem much more interested in taking some kind of anti-science stance than in accepting that there is still work to be done in the field. You seem to want to back up the AC's position that science is some kind of religion, and more specifically, that dark matter is the equivalent of a deity, which is profoundly retarded.
It's crystal clear that the AC's position is based entirely on his anti-secular or anti-science view, and is not only a fool by slashdot standards, but would be laughed off his milk crate if he ever tried to explain his point to a group of laypeople.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
The link next to the text... Find out more about what is going on in south east Wales
This galaxy is in south east Wales? Why did it take so long to find it?! Oh right, cause it's dark.
The lights are out but is there anyone at home?
This really very interesting. What is it? Is a galaxy of long dead stars? If it is normal matter why has it not formed stars? A giant black hole.
Is it emitting in X-RAY, Gamma, IR?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
NO! Don't you see! The reason we the black hole appears larger than the galaxy is because it is rushing straight towards us!
We are all gonna die!
(Commence running around screaming, etc.)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
OH NO!! It's a Deathstar!! Be careful of the dark side or bring out the evil!!
...is it faster than the speed of lint? I know its not faster than Ludicrous Speed.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
We have multiple ideas without certainty that any of them are accurate. Imagine you gave me a box, and said, "tell me what's inside." Without looking in it, I evaluate the weight, I shake it, whatever, and I get the idea that, from my observations, it might make sense that it was a cell phone. Of course, it could also be a rock about the same size and weight as a cell phone. Or it could possibly be a hunk of wood. However, I admit that I'm not certain which one of those things it is, and further, I admit there's a possibility that it might not be any of them.
Given this example, would it be fair to say that "I don't know what's in the box"? I have some ideas about what it might be, some ideas that might make sense, but if someone says that I don't know what's in the box, are they wrong?
...if anybody out there has the technology to cloak an entire freakin' galaxy. We are so toast.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I do not think the word "theory" means what you think it means. A scientific theory is a thesis that has been proven by numerous experiments, has many peer-reviewed papers published exploring it, and is generally accepted as "truth" by the scientific community.
A (layman/religious) "theory" is a guess that could be disproven at any moment, and which has no basis in fact, except the coincidental.
Now then, when we debate a scientific theory, we know there is a large body of work that supports the theory. We can reference it, and we can reproduce the experiments. When we debate a religious theory, it generally comes down to who can shout the loudest, because there are NO reproducible experiments, and precious-few peer-reviewed papers (How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Discuss.)--certainly not in any respected journals.
As for the desirability of "testing religious theories" there is really no point. As one of my profs put it, If someone comes to you with a 'proof that any angle can be trisected', it doesn't matter how long the proof, how elegant the introduction, how many sources cited, or how clear the abstract. There is no point in reading it, because you know somewhere, buried deep in the discussion, there is a tiny error that renders the entire proof meaningless.
Yeah, right.
Decades of work has indicated more than three ways to make QM compatible with GR, including: string theory (AKA M-theory), twistors, and loop quantum gravity (LQG). However, it is suspected by some that, just like St. Patrick would tell us, these three are actually different facets of the same underlying reality. (Just like different interpretations of QM don't actually produce different predictions.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How about a space-based telescope in an L2 Lissajous orbit, about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth? It's the James Webb Space Telescope (http://www.nasa.jwst.org)
Scientists have discovered the source of Dark Matter and energy in the universe.
/. dupe posts...
/. editor.
Dark Energy is what comprises
and Dark Matter is what is between the ears of every
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
But right now, cosmology is at a particular, historically characterizable point, when a lot of different speculations can theoretically be proved or disproved, but in practice we can't build the equipment. We could theoretically attain the enegrgies needed to show unification between the strong nuclear and electroweak forces, but we'd have to build a particle accelerator that stretches across Jupiter's orbit. We could theoretically pick which Superstring or "M" theories looked the most promising and throw out a thousand competitors, but we'll have to wait for 500 of those 18 month doublings under Moore's law before we can actually build a computer fast enough to process the data.
The Epicycle model didn't get questioned much, until it got so elaborate that it wasn't just 3 epicycles to explain Mars' apparent motion, it was 50 or so. The more we accumulated accurate observations, the more it became obvious Occam's Razor mattered. Eliptical orbits didn't look obviously simpler than a primitive version of the epicycle theory, but did look obviously simpler than its elaborated version.
This goes back to that pesky tangent on religion. When the gap between thoretically provable and practically provable gets large enough, what's the difference? "I'm not making a leap of faith here, it's a scientific prediction! It can be proved! No really! I just need the entire resources of the human race for the next 30,000 years at my personal beck and call, and I'll prove it!"
There's a lot of observed evidence that supports the claim physics, and particularly cosmology, is in the middle of one of those dreaded paradygm shifts. (Ha, got to use that overused word and actually need it - Mad props to Me!).
In other words, it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity is wrong, based solely on its predicting Dark Matter, but when you add in the evidence in other areas, the idea is starting to look just a trifle less rash.
Who is John Cabal?
"...or x-ray and gamma-ray bursts from acceleration jets and from energy emitted by the accretion disk."
This is provided that the black hole was pointed at an angle that we could detect the disk and/or jets, otherwise we'd miss it trying to detect it with that method alone.
IANALOOA
I've read many of them. There's seems to be an amazing amount of "science validated by computer models built using that science" going on here. Great for spotting logical inconsistancies, I'm sure, but as an engineer I prefer not to dine on the menu.
Heck, I'd settle for a mechinism explaining how much-faster-than-light expansion occured - but only for a little while, just enough to make all the numbers come out the way they need to. What inputs drive the speed of universe expansion, or for that matter caused it in the first place, let alone accellerated it (but only breifly).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Whatever that is? Xrays, microways, infrared and UV, i.e. anything outside the visible spectrum is "invisible" radiation. No?
Not that it really clears up the post you're responding to, who seemed to think he was drawing a meaningful distinction between "light" and "visible radiation". Last I checked, light was the visible portion of the EM radiation spectrum. Oh well...
Only if there were something that was bright enough to be seen behind it. There has to be something for a massive object to lense before it can be observed.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If it was a black hole, it would be detected by the movement of visible objects around it, or x-ray and gamma-ray bursts from acceleration jets and from energy emitted by the accretion disk.
You can only detect black holes by this method if there is an a accretion disk. If there is no local matter, there won't be much of a show.
Now it seems pretty unlikely that a central galactic black hole wouldn't be collecting matter, but nature does some pretty odd things. Just the fact that we are discussing a 'dark galaxy' is proof.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I would like to point out that the Vatican runs a telescope in Arizona; before that (1891) it was located in Rome, after light pollution started to encroach it was then moved to the pope's summer residence in the Alban hills southeast of the city. They decided to move again in 1978 to Mount Graham in southern Arizona and the new 1.8 meter scope was finished in 1993. While i largely believe that religion tends to be of a philosophy of "Do as we say, not as we do.", and being a proud agnostic to boot, i could see how all those years ago, the quest for answers about God could lead to looking into the 'heavens' for those answers. God, Gods, spirits, whatever you happen to believe in is simply an accepted superstition. I do not push my beliefs on anyone and i would ask that they do the same. In my opinion science is simply the search for answers where religion is the acceptance that you'll never find the answers you seek.
IANALOOA
...You should just be glad he didn't post pictures of the the Tubgirl supernova.
*shiver*
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You might be saying that. A vast and very vocal group of religionists all claim that they have been told directly what God really is. Problem is, some of them have been told very different things from others of them, and even if they didn't have us athiests and agnostics to deride, they'd be killing each other, as they have been for millennia.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Only on Slashdot will you see calculations for accelerating a Dyson sphere with starlight so you can go visit your girlfriend in another part of the galaxy.
People on Slashdot who can calculate the acceleration effects of starlight on Dyson spheres do not have girlfriends. Sorry.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If only it were true.
Religion is a crutch for people who want to know the "why" of something but don't want to go to all the trouble of following the "how" backwards long enough to get a real answer. People wouldn't be religious if they were clear, critical thinkers because the idea of making non-time-sensitive judgements on faith is an absurd thing born of ignorance and fear.
that is not a very insightful statement.
to your credit, there are a lot of people out there using religion as a crutch, or a way to avoid having to probe for answers. i say someone is not a critical thinker if they refuse to look into things or challenge their beliefs. also i would say someone lacked critical thinking if they refused to examine anything that might alter their perception of the world. for those people your statement is true.
it is entirely different to state that anyone who is religious is automatically lacking in mental activity simply becase they believe in something religious. religious beliefs don't necessarily mean throwing everything else out the window.
to turn it around, it is not at all a display of mental acumen to insist that there is absolutely no such thing as a deity. yes, the things observed and tested can be learned, but if someone has already made up their mind no matter what happens, they are closing their mind off to something simply because their life is easier that way. it will color the conclusions they reach just as it would people unwilling to challenge the doctrines of their church.
the "real answer" you mention is somewhat misleading. if we go back far enough, we get theories (of which one is likely true or at least highly accurate, though i don't know which) about how the big bang. this is an accepted starting point for the universe. it answers the question about where the universe came from, but doesn't quite go back to the origin of all things. there were probably events before the big bang, but we can't really study them now. that energy and mass had to come from something though. i don't mean this to belittle scientific discovery, because i don't think it belittles it at all. it is pretty damn spanky that we can detect the aftereffects of something that happened so long ago. all i mean is that all answers lead to new questions.
i write this as someone who believes in God but does not feel threatened at all by the existence of evolution or DNA or any of the other scientific discoveries that have been made. i don't see how trying to understand the universe from a scientific standpoint is at all antogonistic to my belief that there is a God or vice versa.
it doesn't bother me that you think i'm wrong about the existence of God. it bothers me that you can be very logical, but in a few cases such as this you sometimes resort to overgeneralization based on the actions of some.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
>>If you're attacking religion at least get your facts strait.
Often the religious people don't know anything about Aquinas or Descartes. They don't know about philosophy or ethics. They just want to disparage science. These people are poor partners for level headed conversation. Making assertions in a controlled, adult manner won't be repaid with thoughful responses. Instead they spin and spit venom.
>>The pro-religious posters on /. don't bring up these "scientific" errors, why do stubborn pro-science folks bring up layman religion that has nothing to do with real religion?
I can't say I'm following you 100%. But you seem to more interested in an exchange of ideas than in pushing your view, and that's my big issue. In the context of this exchange, I can tell you that I think the "science bots" attack the religion in cases where the other person has already showed that they will not be swayed or back down from an erroneous or offensive assertion on the basis of their religion or faith. Or, if the person is just trolling, the attack on the religion might just be a means to attacking the person.
Also, religion and science and philosophy are all very deep subjects with many layers and nuances. Frequently oversimplifications are made just for the sake of appearance. Evolution is attacked in this way constantly. Religion is also applied incorrectly sometimes. The spiritual teachings of Christianity, IMHO, have intrinsic value. However, I consider a literal interpretation of Genesis to border on idiocy. When I dismiss religion as superstition, it's because I've concluded that the person I'm talking to thinks that reality is a function of the whims of magical ghosts. If I'm discussing religion as a way of connecting with other people or ones own nature (which isn't often) then I know we're not talking about Santa and the Easter Bunny, but about humanity.
Wow, I sure rambled. Oh well. I guess I'm saying that people who think the earth is 6000 years old and use that as the basis for arguing anything falsifiable are fools or worse, and they draw attacks on their religion be being inappropriate.
And of course sometimes people attack religion as a shortcut - you believe X and X is silly so you must be wrong about Y - and that's not so great. In cases where someone is just bashing science or scientists, sometimes turnabout is fair play. Of course it's better if one can just say "Look, you said ABC, but ABC is false because of JKL and QRS and VWX", but often (so often) people take positions whose message isn't factual, but emotional, and that's when the fireworks begin. The AC had a tone of this in his post; he said nothing about politics, but his message evokes the political stage of left and right. I could post on ChristianScienceMonitor that "Bush's claims to be directed by God indicates psychosis not faith", but I'd never win the debate. It would be a flamewar in seconds if they didn't delete the comment outright. There's more at issue than just my assertion that Bush is incorrect to assert that "God" whispered in his ear. Its a case of coloring the forum with an undertone of presumptions. No one is truly neutral (no one) and everyone lives their life with partial knowledge. When people speak in winks and nudges, they have already given up their claim to pseudo-objectivity. They've taken a side, accepted their subjectivity without trying to grasp the subjective truth of the other side. And when they try to push their subjectivity as objective, that's offensive. When I see people doing that, I dig my heels in - I guess I could go all socratic on them, but it would be lost on most of them (by them I mean trolls, I do not mean religious people in general).
Ow, carpal tunnel.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Personally, I'd love to see a ground-based scope on the far side of the moon to replace hubble, but I'm probably just dreaming.
If it were on the far sde of the moon, how would we ever download the pics?
OK, I'll do it.
Single-star dyson spheres: number_of_stars*4*pi*radius^2
where radius is the radius you build the sphere at. number_of_stars is something like 10^11
Galaxy dyson sphere: 1*2*pi*8_kiloparsecs^2
16 kiloparsecs is given as the approximation of the galaxy in question's diameter. I'm using 2*pi*radius^2 since you can build a flattened spheroid... spiral galaxies are pretty flat.
n.b. 1 parsec = 3.1x10^16 m
1 earth-sun distance (astronomical unit) = 1.50x10^11 m
so surface area of case 1 over case 2 is
radius^2*7.3x10^-8
where radius is in astronomical units. So, if you take a pretty conservative case and build your sphere at the same distance the Earth is at, then you have to use about 10^7 times more material to build a galaxy sphere. (I'm sure with most stars you could build it a lot closer, and live on the outside)
Still, interesting idea, and I agree totally that it would be prettier. It might have a problem with stars hitting it though...
Anyway, to get a little more on-topic, it's impossible in this case since astronomers detected hydrogen in the galaxy, they just haven't observed any stars. So the stars could be covered, the whole galaxy couldn't be.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
it is entirely different to state that anyone who is religious is automatically lacking in mental activity
I didn't say they were lacking in mental activity. I reserve that particular insult for certain types of Bush supporters. I don't think that lacking critical thinking skills - which I think, based on my observation of people who are religious, is something of a common trait among more traditionally religious individuals - is an indication that a person is stupid anymore than I think complex critical thinkers are automatically smart.
Also, note that I didn't say there is no god. It would be folly to begin dismissing things as impossible because they haven't discovered. By that argument, one could say the universe doesn't exist because there's never been a discovery or conclusion made that explained its origins.
To the contrary, my point is that to believe in a god requires you to dispatch all logical thought and arbitrarily assume that this abstract concept you've never sensed, measured, or tested in any manner is the answer to any given problem you're facing. You could argue that "god" is merely a concept used to identify forces that drive the universe which haven't yet been discovered but the effects of which can be observed (which goes back to the original post I made), but since most people view "god" as a specific entity, not an abstract concept, that doesn't hold water when talking about the overall majority of religious individuals.
And, yes, your point the big bang is completely valid, but I'd like to turn around on you. A large number of religious people seem to feel unncessarily threatened by the big bang theory. Even though it's by far the best available explanation and is probably correct in at least the general sense if not in the specifics, these people refuse to accept it. Why? Because they THINK it challenges their belief in god. Of course, if you understand Big Bang, that's utterly ridiculous and practically completely the opposite. To the contrary, the big bang explains the state of the universe at point in time 0. So what happened or existed BEFORE that point in time? Well, shit man, your guess is good as mine, and, actually, all explanations as to what actually CREATED the singularity (e.g. "the creation of the universe") is pure wild speculation. There are a few semi-stable ideas, but no theories at all because everything we know about our universe as far as laws go breaks down from a fraction of a second after the big bang backwards in time.
And that, my friend, is why I have come to so closely associate ignorance and religion. I've known countless people who will argue endlessly that evolution or the Big Bang theory are some sort of insult to their religion when, in fact, neither theory is easily contestable and, more importantly, neither theory, when properly understood, is anything remotely close to a challenge to arbitrary religious beliefs about creationism and god.
Sorry, but this is my experience. YMMV.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
i agree with you on those types of bush supporters, though. i agree that there are some very vocal religious people that handle their beliefs as you have illustrated. i agree with your post with the exception of this statement:
my point is that to believe in a god requires you to dispatch all logical thought and arbitrarily assume that this abstract concept you've never sensed, measured, or tested in any manner is the answer to any given problem you're facing.
ideally logical thought should continue regardless of one's beliefs. sadly it doesn't play out. as i see it, truth is more important than belief. if belief remains unchallenged, there can be no progress. that doesn't mean belief is bad, it just shouldn't be left alone. either something is true or it isn't. challenging a belief allows a person to adjust their beliefs for a reason other than something completely arbitrary.
and as a side, the above quote is why i claimed you didn't believe in God. i extrapolated that since you thought that way, you probably weren't including yourself in the group of those who had abandoned logic. sorry if i misread. i didn't mean to point you out as a heretic.* i meant that i really don't care if you believe the same thing as me, only that you'd be willing to admit someone can be logical about their beliefs even if they are religious.
*heretic is such a strong word, and i see specific religious beliefs as so personal that i cannot think of a time when its use would truly be appropriate. it's good for making jokes about people who don't use [pet OS] or the like, but that's about it.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
Given this example, would it be fair to say that "I don't know what's in the box"?
If there is something in the box, and you don't know what it is, then it would be appropriate to say that you cannot give a convincing description of it's contents. But it would be foolhardy to say that you have "no idea" what is in the box. If you feel it moving around when you shake it, you have at least one idea about the contents - they act as though they have mass. If you want to say that we aren't sure what dark matter is or sure how it acts, that's accurate. If you want to say that we have "no idea, no idea at all" about this phenomenon we describe as dark matter, then you are wrong. We know that something, whether it is an undiscovered particle or a whole system of forces acting like invisible matter, is exerting forces on visible matter. The fact is that we do have "an idea" of what is going on. We have theories that attempt to explain the observations. We do not have certainty, but we do have "an idea".
>>Given this example, would it be fair to say that "I don't know what's in the box"?
Because knowledge implies certainty in some degree, that would be fair. But it would be wrong to say that you have "no idea" what is in the box.
You seem to be awfully keen to prove something. What's your point? Before I start flaming you in earnest, are you trying to posit that science is not valid, or that dark matter is a fig leaf created by scientists who can't accept their lack of absolute objective knowledge? Correct me if I'm wrong in what I'm about to say, but from where I stand it looks like you're just trying to cast doubt on the idea of dark matter because you have some bias against science.
Actually, screw politeness. The AC was being a punk. I think you're just being a punk too. Prove me wrong, state your point, if you have one. It obviously has to do with getting someone to admit that "we don't know" something. What? out with it! Are you going to ask us to be jehova's witnesses or something? I don't know what you think you're accomplishing, but its having the effect of making you look like a church apologist. The AC was wrong, and he's an ass. What purpose is there for you to try to back him up? You're like the girl in my middle school who would respond to everything with "why". I have to go. "why?" because I have to catch my bus. "why?" because it's gonna leave and I need to go home. "why?" because I need to eat dinner. "why?" because I'm hungry. "why?" because I haven't eaten for 4 hours. "why?" because I was busy. "why?"
Dude, you're like that girl. Here's a tip - pestering ability is not wisdom. You're just being a prick. Get lost, hoser.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Religion = St. Augustine, Auquinas, Bacon (hmm, precursor to science...), Descartes, etc. Religion does not = televangelists, salem witch trials, crusades, etc.
Well, maybe in parts of the world, but this is blatantly false here in the US.
Just look at the exit polls from the last election.
Bush got re elected on one and only one issue. The fact that that Bush's stance on that and similar issues is directly opposed to the teachings that he and the people who voted for him claim to follow has zero impact on the thought processes of these people.
That is far more in line with televangelists and the Salem witch trials than anything resembling rational thought.
The artificialness of the inflationary model of which I speak is the idea that, about the time the strong force seperated, the inflation rate was briefly many many times higher than at the time of recombination. "The universe needs to be a certain size at recombination for the CMB data to make sense, but that size is too big for the CMB temperature to have equalized across the universe, so let's just assume this convenient very rapid inflaiton before that, to make everything work out." There's no mechanism to explain why that would happen, it's a bag on the side of the theory.
OK, I'll admit that occasionally when someone says "for this model to be consistant, we'll just assume this very odd thing about the universe" they're right, but far more often it's not the universe that has the problem.
However, I don't totally discount this oddball ad-hockey because it did make some predictions that MAP seems to be confirming.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How do they know it does not contain any stars? After all...would not a star made of "dark matter" be radiating the so called "dark energy?" Why does stars made of dark matter have to radiate visible energy?
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
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This article describes studies of intergalactic gas 150 times hotter than the sun. Such gas is difficult to detect because it can only radiate at ultraviolet wavelengths:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/missing_matt er_030212.html/
"A worthy cause has never been harmed by the truth" - Gandhi
- I have a great model for the big-bang theory: it's inconstsiant with the observed redshift of distant galaxies, but I'll just add this "cosmological constant" and it will be fine.
- I have a better model, and we don't need that mysterious cosmological constant, so out it goes.
- Better measurements call for a better model, it doesn't quite account for the redshift of distant galaxies, so welcome back cosmological constant!
- Hmmm, all the observed matter and expected dark matter still doesn't quite make things work out, lets add "dark energy" to explain the cosmological constant!
- Wow, great CMB data but it appears that the cosmological constant isn't quite, ummmm, constant. Yeah, can someone come up with a model for brief hyper-inflation real quick? And I don't mean Jimmy Carter.
I'm not convinced the inflation theory is wrong, but please excuse my skepticism given the track record!Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Actually, just saw another interesting article on the subject. Hubble photogrphed two colliding spiral galaxies. They were in a position such that one should have been able to see the behind galaxy through the empty spaces in the spiral arms of the front galaxy.
:) There is supposed to be a satellite launch in a few years to try to detect some of the other dark matter theories, if some of these theoretical exotic particle theories are correct, then we should be able to detect them with the right equipment.
Only, you couldn't. The "empty space" between the spiral arms was completely black. Meaning that they were filled with interstellar "dust". Much more dust that was thought to exist there.
The amount of real matter just went up and dark matter went down as there is now known to be a lot more mass in simple matter contined, invisibly, within galaxies than was previously thought.
There is a lot of speculation on what the "other" dark matter is, but so far, everytime any real "dark" matter is actually found, it seems to always turs out to be... plain old matter that was not known to exist in a certain place or in a certain way.
As for your question, yeah, well it'll just take time, at some point it may all be accounted for, or not, well see
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
There's disagreement *within* the scientific community about "dark matter" and "dark energy". You don't need to be a religious nut. In fact, to claim that we really *know* what the deal is with "dark matter", you pretty much need to be the sort of nut who believes every over-hyped "discovery" that "scientists discover". Dude.
It's not that I'm a believer, it's that I'm cynical. I'm cynical about unproven scientific theories that even the experts in that field will admit they don't really understand or they're not even confident about it. And I feel the same sort of annoyance at people who believe everything written in a scientific journal as that annoyance you feel towards those who believe everything written in the bible. Yes, even scientists can be wrong. And yes, there are disagreements between scientists. Dude.
Because knowledge implies certainty in some degree, that would be fair. But it would be wrong to say that you have "no idea" what is in the box.
So... wait. Given my example, let's say you ask me what's in the box, and I say, "seems to be something small and hard. Not too heavy, though." You insist again that I tell you, specifically, what's actually in the box. You demand an answer and I say, "Dude, I have no idea." Are you going to then jump down my throat and call me a religious nut? You don't know me, dude.
Yup, just put another one in L1 and do some serious interferometry.
This AC is correct... he didn't deserve to be modded down, and I probably didn't deserve my +5, Interesting.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Well, I don't believe in god. Very simple really. There's no logical reason TO believe in god, so I see no reason to think there is one.
Hence, faith.
Faith is not logical. It's an arbitrary belief people come by because other people told them to believe and those people can't provide valid proof that they're right. Would you dispute that?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
You mention that we "don't understand gravity as well as we think we do," but last time I checked.... gravity doesn't REPEL objects.
... get this... negatively damped. If you go through calculations of the Energy-Momentum tensor for the system, the pressure holding the system in is exactly 1 times the negative of the energy density. In other words, the equation for this state mandates that there is a form of energy in the universe which has a negative equivalent gravitational effect.
The greatest evidence for "dark matter" comes not from an astrophysicist necessarily, but rather from scalar field theory in physics.
Using a very well known differential equation for cosmological inflation:
phi ddot + 3H phi dot + V' = 0
where H is the Hubble constant and the middle term refers to damping, we can see that our observable universe is
Physicists pretty uniformly refer to this effect as "dark matter." There is credence given to it amongst the physics community because with simple field theory calculations of this sort, the entirety of Maxwell's E/M equations and all of classical Lagrangian mechanics can be derived fairly easily on a page or two. Dirac derived relativistic quantum field theory from this as well. So, seeing as the most fundamental branches of physics: classical (E/M), relativity, and QFT are a stone's throw from one another in this formalism, people take it seriously. Also, if you do a very simple observation of fluid dynamics on rotating disc-like galaxies, you will find the equations yield the entirely wrong answer. For:
del . (del p / rho) = del (omega^2 r rhat) - del^2 U
where p is pressure, rho is mass density, omega is angular velocity, r is radius from the center of the rotating frame, and U is gravitational attractive energy. This yields very bad results and since the data we can collect is quite accurate, as well as the terms in the model being about as general as they come, it is a powerful indicator of something wrong, something which an attractive force (e.g. gravity) can't account for in the cosmological equation of state.
i would not entirely dispute that. faith is not logic. but logic is not the only good way to reason. logic or faith, void entirely of the other, would be a lesser form of reasoning than when one is tempered or outright blended with the other. there are definately times when one is more appropriate than the other. i dispute that my faith goes against being able to reason logically. that's really all.
i would say that faith is more personal than simply being told something and accepting it. even within the same congregation, people have different ideas of deity. in the most extreme sense, someone originates a particular flavor of belief system. while there is usually not concrete physical evidence people must decide for themselves what is valid. people must choose where they put their faith, if anywhere. there are those who simply believe whatever they are told and never question or explore on their own. they often seem to treat their politics the same as their religion.
logic and critical thinking are important. i believe they serve to enhance the faith of those who seek a truth for themselves rather than a comfort.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
of the existence of black cats in coal cellars at midnight.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Thanks for straightening me out. Not enough sleep, pulled up an old link and read it too fast.
Cheers. :-)
"A worthy cause has never been harmed by the truth" - Gandhi
Everybody knows that dark is what happens when something fills up with light. (By the way, I googled the poor bastard I just linked to. Do your worst.)
For years, we all knew that lightbulbs emit light. Science has now proven this false. Lightbulbs, and other sources of light suck in darkness. In fact, when a lightbulb becomes full of dark, it stops working and has a dark spot on it. Candles are an even better example, since the wick clearly turns black as it is progressively exposed to dark.
Dark also has mass, which causes it to generate heat from friction as it is sucked in. Because lightbulbs are made of clear glass, the dark can go in easier than it can for a candle and there is less heat. For this reason, you don't want to touch a candle while it is sucking dark.
Maybe if the new Dr. Who gets in a budget crunch, they can spend a season trapped in a "dark galaxy".
A few flashlights, and some metallic wrapping paper and they're all set.
WwWWWwwWWWwwWoOoOOoOOOOooOOo
DaAaAAaAaARrkkKK GaaAAaaAaAAAaAaalxyyYyYyyy...
Please do not take this post into account.
Which would be a very vivid demonstration of natural selection at work... how utterly tidy of them!
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Ok, first of all, somebody please mod this parent up for that thought; I've been hoping for someone to suggest pretty much the same thing for a long, LONG time (it also sounds like a pretty good place for a RADIO telescope; not too many electric shavers and "Mr. Microphones" on the Moon!)
Second, regarding AO, I just happened to catch about ten minutes of a presentation titled "Unveiling a Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way" (carried on DISH Network at channel 9412) and the Q&A turned to AO (I presume a good bit of the lecture dealt with AO, from the way the lady talked, but I'm not sure...) If you'd like to check it out, apparently the entire lecture (recorded Oct. 30'th, 2003) is available here (along with a handful of other juicy-sounding titles...)
And on the ground-based -vs- Hubble debate, I say "I dunno, if we're willing to raise money for a television show then surely there's somebody out there willing to organize a "bake sale" or something for such a useful piece of hardware...whether the money's used to build a completely new scope (somewhere, ANYwhere) or if it's used to blast Hubble all the way to the nearest 'Lagrange point'." (Yeah, yeah, I know; now I'm dreaming...)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
All of the current theories may be wrong. But you're positing that we have "no idea". That's bullshit and that's what I'm pissed about. There's a world of difference between "We aren't sure" and "we have no idea". There WAS a point at which we had "no idea", no theory, no reasonable guesses. However, now we do have "an idea". That idea is dark matter. You don't have to agree. I'm not an astrophysicist myself. But if you want to pretend that we have no clue, no guess, no information at all, then you're just plain wrong. Period.
I don't insist that everone agree on the cause. You're positing that we have no idea. That's bullshit. Now you're saying that I'm insisting that everyone accept dark matter as fact. That's an error on your part. I never said "Dark matter is the true explanation!!!!11" I said you and the AC are wrong in your assertion that we have "no idea". Do you understand the difference?
I don't know if you're a religious.
>>It's not that I'm a believer, it's that I'm cynical.
Good, be cynical! That's great! Be a skeptic! I am too. If you say that we're not sure what's causing the phenomena, that's totally wise and good. But don't say that we "have not idea", because we do have an idea. That idea is dark matter. Is one of the theories true? Are any of them? Maybe or maybe not. Saying that we have no idea is saying that we do not have the concept of dark matter.
>>So... wait. Given my example, let's say you ask me what's in the box, and I say, "seems to be something small and hard.
Look at what you wrote, right there. Do we have any idea what's in the box? "something small and hard". Yes, we have an idea. Do we know Exactly what's in the box, no we do not, and I have been consistent. You on the other hand, just seem to be pushing a bias.
>>And I feel the same sort of annoyance at people who believe everything written in a scientific journal as that annoyance you feel towards those who believe everything written in the bible. Yes, even scientists can be wrong. And yes, there are disagreements between scientists. Dude.
Gee, thanks for telling me what I already know. Would you kindly point out where I said "Dark matter is unquestionably true" or "scientists never make mistakes"? I'm ticked because you're not making any statements about the merit of the science, you're just poo-pooing it. You STILL haven't stated what your point was, and I still think you're just being contrary because you feel like it. So for the last time, do you have a point? Cause the only thing I see you doing is implying that science has no idea whatsoever what's going on. If you meant that science is not sure, say that! It's 100% true and I won't argue with that. If you want to keep implying that science is trying to hide something, I'm going to keep flaming you, because that's not skepticism, that's right wing fearmongering.
>>So... wait. Given my example, let's say you ask me what's in the box, and I say, "seems to be something small and hard. Not too heavy, though." You insist again that I tell you, specifically, what's actually in the box. You demand an answer and I say, "Dude, I have no idea."
If you want to conflate uncertainty with total lack of insight, have a ball. There's a big difference between "we have no idea" and "we're not sure". So what is it? do you have a point? If it's just that dark matter is not the final word, then I'm going to be underwhelmed, because that was never in contention.
>>For all your complaining that everyone is religious, you don't know me. You're the one jumping to conclusions. You're the one insisting that everyone in the world agrees with you about substances exhibiting seemingly magical properties
And the coup de grace.. Know you? I never said you were re
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Ok, dude, don't cry about it. It'll be ok. No one's challenging you now. Go to your safe place. Your happy place. Breathe in, breathe out. Calm... all is happy and calm.
Bill Moyers: Theocrats and ideologues in charge of US government. Moyers: For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad, but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Good idea, but the "Mission to Mars" is taking a big bite out of scientific funds at NASA. JWST may get delayed due to this "reprogramming" of money.
They've discovered my illegal garbage dump.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
I got some dirt on the actual techniques they used to find the galaxy.
Bob: Ok, hand me that picture.
Dave: But how do you know..
Bob: Look, just hand me the freaking picture.
Dave: Okay, okay!
Bob: Now, all we need to do is draw a little oval with a dashed line, like so.. voila! Instant invisible galaxy.
Dave: Is that an invisible Paris Hilton?
Bob: I'll be damned, that girl's got more pictures floating around than the royal family.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At least you know when you're beat. Now, it only you could learn to make a graceful exit.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer