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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 love the picture of the night sky with a big circle around a nondescript part. I looked at it was like "oicic."
... 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.
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!
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?
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
Seriously, though.... Just because no light gets out doesn't mean no light is produced.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
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
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
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
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.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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.
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.
Oh.
...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.
They just changed their numbers, after the Paris Hilton "Shizzack".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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...
...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...
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
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
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.
Hydrogren gas is not dark matter. Dark matter is non-baryonic (i.e., not made of baryons -- the nucleus of a Hydrogen atom is a baryon). Dark matter does not interact electromagnetically, so it is probably more accurate to call it "transparent matter" (but the name "dark matter" has stuck).
It's pulling around lots of H. The H emits radio waves, which we can pick up.
--LWM
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?
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!
As in "How long does it take for a management chain to pass the blame"
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".
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'.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
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))]
There is both baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter. Astronomers worry about understanding both. HI isn't bad because it emits 21 cm radiation (although very weakly), but things like black holes, low-mass dwarf stars, cool white dwarfs and neutron stars, all count toward dark matter. There is a lot more non-baryonic dark matter, absolutely, and it dominates galaxy masses and is indeed the primary thing of interest here.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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!
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.
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...
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
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.
It's a very well supported hypothesis based on empirical evidence. The only viable alternative would be that we have gravity very, very wrong on large scales, and the evidence is against that. On the other hand, the evidence for non-baryonic dark matter comes from a number of areas, not just galactic motions. One form of non-baryonic dark matter you probably know something about is the neutrino, which apparently does have a tiny mass based on recent experiments demonstrating oscillations, but other considerations indicate that neutrinos are far from the dominant type of dark matter. Thirty years ago, your level of skepticism would have been appropriate. To experts in the field today, it's a no-brainer. What the stuff actually is, however, is still largeley unknown.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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)
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.
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
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.
Yes, right, neutrinos can only contribute a tiny amount.
Similar to galactic rotation curves, galaxy velocities in clusters are too high without large amounts of dark matter.
The best evidence at this stage probably comes from the microwave background acoustic peaks. The amplitudes of the second and third peaks depend on the amount of baryonic matter (second peak) and the total amount of matter (third peak), and indicate about six times as much non-bayonic matter as baryonic matter. We still don't know what it is, but know how much there is to two significant figures.
I've alerady linked to it already in this thread, but I'll do it again because it is a very nice pedagogical website about these results. Check out Wayne Hu's webapages.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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...
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?
Here's a graph that shows the peaks the PP describes, along with an attempt at an explanation of that graph. I can't understand quantitatively WTF "angular coherance" or "multipole moment" is, but qualitatively this seems to be a measure of the graininess of the temperature fluctuations.
These temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Background Radiation as thought to indicate the size of the irregularities that once scattered the CMB photons (essentially the light from the big bang) in the very early universe. Once the universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to be stable, the CMB radiation would no longer be scattered, so the size of the temperature fluctuations tell us about the density variations of the early universe.
Those density variations are interesting becuase they're enough by themselves to lead to galaxy formation, as density variation tends to increase over time.
The first peak shows that the universe is nearly flat. Open and closed are both within the error bars (anyone else suspicious that the universe is exactly flat?).
The second peak, according to this theory, measures the mass of baryons as a fraction of the total effective mass (mostly energy at that point) of the universe, and the third peak the ratio of all matter to the effective mass of matter+energy in the universe.
What I can't follow is why the second peak is baryons only, but the third peak is all matter. It seems to me that if both baryons and non-baryons have mass and gravity there would be no way to distinguish between dark baryons and dark non-baryons. The presentaiton doesn't seem to explain that.
I'm not seeing how the CMB data is evidence for non-baryonic dark matter.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If only it were true.
>>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
The second peak depends on the sound speed, which depends on the temperature and density of ONLY THE BARYONIC matter. It is a true acoustic peak, and so depends on how fast sound waves travel, which is not something affected by the non-baryonic matter. The number you get is completely consistent with the number you get from the light element abundances and big bang nucleosynthesis theory.
The universe is almost certainly exactly flat. Flatness is expected from inflation, but, more tellingingly, is the fact that if it weren't exactly flat (to within 40 orders of magnitude), it shouldn't be close to anything flat today.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Sorry, my off-the-cuff statement about the sound speed and baryon density wasn't really right. Certainly there is some effect there, but it isn't the important issue in determining the amplitude of the second peak. I teach this stuff, but I don't do research in it and I do need to look up the details sometimes.
The descreased amplitude of the second peak arises from an effect called baryon loading explained here. The suppression arises from a coupling of the barynons to the plasma prior to recombination. The non-baryonic matter is transparent.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I personally admit that sometimes I act like a zealot; I do it when I confront religious zealots. I am not savvy enough to argue from first principles with someone who argues from religious faith. I don't think it's good, I just think it's less bad than leaving their viewpoint unopposed. Which isn't to say that I think their views are not valid; I think they are. But I think they're often misapplied. I can see how two wrongs don't make a right, and that maybe when someone says something obviously trollish I should laugh it off-- but the national atmosphere in the US since the day after 9/11 has me thinking that people say a lot of things, and that even false or weak statements can be accepted if unopposed. I don't have the chops to push back against the conservative republican movement, so I like to imagine that I can have a social impact by keeping my liberalness "loud and proud", at least here.
Also, I think some of this behavior is primate- or mammal-territorial .. I think of slashdot as a place where I'm (somewhat) shielded from people who hate science, hate liberals, hate nerds. And I feel that in a very small way I can perpetuate that safe space for people like me by rebutting things that infringe on it. I don't go out of my way to bash the religious, but I *do* go out of my way to confound people who say things that bash liberals or scientists, because I identify with those groups.
I believe that religion is a useful and meaningful part of human knowledge, like philosophy or science or history.
Blah! I have to leave work now.
I have a gmail invite, you can have it if you want.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer