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Galaxies Floating on a Dark Matter Stream
Darkman, Walkin Dude writes "A team in Switzerland has discovered that most of the small satellite galaxies around the Milky Way's near-twin, Andromeda, are lined up in a single plane that slices through Andromeda's spiral disc. Using images from the Hubble space telescope, soon to be decommissioned, the researchers found that 9 of the 14 of Andromeda's satellites lay on a relatively narrow plane bisecting Andromeda. From the article: 'The team believes the plane could have formed in several ways. In one scenario, the galaxies may have fallen towards Andromeda along an invisible filament of dark matter. Computer simulations show these filaments can form a cosmic web along which galaxies flow.'"
Does dark matter hold our universe together in a web? Perhaps, though this would mean that there is no such thing as truly empty space as a small amount of dark matter would have to exist. Perhaps what lays beneath the edges of our universe is nothing in the sense of it being devoid of dark matter?
Check this out: From this article.
While this article only mentions computer simulations, many scientific groups have gone along further researching, convinced that the cosmic web does exist. Some people have based most of their work on dark matter and the cosmic web though I believe it is still speculation and has yet to be accepted by the science community as a whole. I've read some crazy stuff about dark matter, like how it might be the "gravity particle" that is attracted to matter uniformly and causes the gravitational pull between objects. And even crazier books suggesting that the only way we'll ever be able to communicate between parallel existences is by lowering and raising these gravity particles.
Now, the slashdot community seems to be fairly educated and extremely opinionated so how about it--does dark matter exist? If so, since it is very difficult to detect, what are its defining properties?
My work here is dung.
How the fuck did you write such a thorough and cogent response as a FIRST POST nonetheless??!?!?!
You cant really tell apart if you are reading science and pseudoscience (talking about the "parallel existence" stuff). And i seriously dont know why you think that the graviton is dark matter... or are you mixing this part up and mean the higgs boson?
About this "web of dark matter": The WMAP data of the galactic background STRONGLY supports this hypothesis. The anisoropy is just too large, and too soon to be explained by non-external (i.e. non-photon interacting) gravitational influences.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
In another scenario, the Intelligent Designer put them on that specific plane just to see how long it took before somebody noticed and claimed that it must be Dark Matter.
"i dont know...that idea suddenly came to my head..."
Yeah I get really wierd ideas about the universe when I smoke that suff too...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Do you know something that NASA and us astronomers don't?
North Korea is making far bigger noises about making their own nuclear bombs, but no one seems to make such a fuss .... Oh, but wait a mo, .... does it have much oil underground ?
So does this mean that the photino birds are winning or the Xeelee?
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Eric Lerner is looking less and less like a crank with every new cosmological experiment, I think this is exactly what his plasma filament theory of the intergalactic medium has been predicting.
That is all.
Its a pity there isn't a world wide demand for Barbequed beef ("pulgoki"), its a dam tasty dish, one i would go to war for!!!
In one scenario, the galaxies may have fallen towards Andromeda along an invisible filament of dark matter.
In another scenario, the Flying Spaghetti Monster might have used His Noodly Appendage to intelligently design it that way. Scientists speculate the arrangement makes it easier for Him to make a bank shot on the 9-ball galaxy.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
Well let's see, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe says it will never be visited by a space shuttle repair mission again, which means it will be history as soon as its batteries or gyroscope fails within the next few years, despite repeated efforts by concerned groups to keep it up and running. I'd call that effectively decommissioned.
From the BBC after NASA's 2006 budget announcement (in February 2005)...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Am I the only one who thinks this headline sounds like something some scientist completely pulled out of his ass? "Yeah...so you know dark matter? All the planets are, like, floating on it. And I am TOTALLY stoned...."
Um dude, O'Keefe has been gone from NASA for nine months now, your article link is almost a year old. One of the first things that the new administrator Michael Griffin did when he took over the reins was to try to figure out ways to keep Hubble alive. Griffin's an actual scientist, unlike O'Keefe who's a career-track manager. And thus sees the important of Hubble, which has been indispensible for astronomical research.
Direct from NASA's Hubble page , it says
make world, not war
If they eventually find more evidence for these "dark matter streams", and start naming them, I think "the styx" would be a completely awesome name for such a stream.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Do you know something that NASA and us astronomers don't?
Talking to yourself?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In his zeal to take a political potshot Zonk has ignored the most recent developments. Don't be deceived. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has reconsidered earlier the earlier decision to scrap Hubble servicing. A shuttle crew will indeed have to risk their lives to extend Hubble's life for a few more years. Relax. There should still be lots of money left over to invest in Iraqi freedom, and to kill Al Qaida.
an ill wind that blows no good
Adaptive optics coupled with some monster telescopes can give imagery better than Hubble.
But of course saying so won't get anyone some Bush Derangement Syndrome mod points.
Cosmic web = the crystal spheres of the modern age.
Wait, I've seen this episode of Star Trek. We have to get two dimensional!
your article link is almost a year old
I even noted that in my post, to pre-emptively head off any nitpicking. Looking at the page you link to, I see no concrete plans. I see "if", I see "possibility", I see "could", and I see "might". Nothing that says, yes, we will repair Hubble in the mission scheduled for such and such a date. I'm all for a continuance of Hubble service; I just don't see it happening.
O'Keefe has been gone from NASA for nine months now
Yup, I should have said "said", not says. Mea culpa for the typo.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
It's real, it's a real great way to get money from the government for made up science.
Yes, that's my opinion, but this backs it up.
I want a refund.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
You mean the first S. Korean or Japanese city, which matters to me, because I might be included. As America's strongest allies in the region, and home to something like 100K US soldiers (who are only intermittently subject to local laws, thanks to the legacy of post-WWII and Korean War US planning), Japan and S. Korea will be in grave danger if there's a shooting war with N. Korea.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Matter = Stuff Anti-Matter = Stuff that blows stuff up Dark Matter = The stuff that isn't there, that we keep bumping into
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Galaxies Floating on a Dark Matter Stream
So, the old lady was right... it's turtles all the way down.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
We are bound by Naturalism, so a plausible explaination for the existence of such phenomena as a plane of galaxies slicing through a spiral galaxy in our doctrine of Big Bang cosmology: It's the result of a creative Go...uh, powerful Gravity, from Dark Stuff in the shape of filaments. No need to theorize what the Dark Stuff is or how it got there in that shape. We see the effects, and so we believe by faith that Dark Stuff exists...naturally.
Amazing how things don't gravitate towards these theorist's brains. And too bad; they need a slap in the face reality check.
China helps N. Korea, but I would be very surprised if they gave them ICBMs. Considering how bad the yellow panic is already getting in some circles in the States, the last thing China wants to do is to provoke a war with America. Regardless, it's obviously a Bad Thing if N. Korea goes to war, something that the Bush Administration seems to have miraculously realized within about the past year.
Then someone noticed that there were an awful lot of coincidences between clusters and dark spots on the map. Oh, well. Hello, Square One.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It has to coalesce faster than matter or it won't guide the matter in forming galaxies, but it has to coalesce slower than matter or it won't remain in a sphere around the galaxies that form. It has to form a spherical shape around galaxies for it to be of use in explaining the flat rotational velocities of galaxies, but it has to take the form of long filaments to explain the shape of supercluster.
...here. With some uberkewl photos to back up what they're saying.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
So we have two theories:
a) dark matter filaments (modeled on a computer no less). Matter we cannot see; who's existence is contentious, etc.
b) the remnants of a cannibalized galaxy. Solid evidence of this principle abundantly available.
Why leap to the more complicated and, arguably esoteric, explanation?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
AP - Scientists at the prestigious CERN institute in Switzerland announced late Friday that the so-called 'dark matter', which makes up 90% of the universe, is actually bullshit.
"These findings come as a surprise," stated Dr. Weissmann, lead scientist at the institute. "Before today, we thought dark matter might be, say, an agglomeration of exotic subatomic particles, like muons or 'strange' quarks, signifying a problem with the equations governing space-time. Instead, all that turns out to be bullshit."
Other hypotheses included Cheez-puffs and intelligent end-users. But the conclusive evidence for the new Bullshit Theory of Matter came from the Hubble space telescope, which since 1995 has been sending back data that, according to scientists, is "complete and utter bull."
"Over and over we ran through the equations, and each time we came up with the same answer: This is crap," affirmed Weismann. "It's satisfying, in a way, to be able to say that about your life's work."
-C.
- undoware.ca
What is mind? No matter.
But what is matter? Nevermind.
News for nerds, Dark that matters.
Working in conjunction with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Fermilab, they were able to determine most of the universe's galactic sheet structures were aligning themselves with a majob B.S. /dark matter production source, centered in G.W. Bush's voice box.
ahref=http://www.mkaku.org/rel=url2html-18972http: //www.mkaku.org/>
San Francisco Photographers
dark matter makes little sence, it's probably just electro-magnetism.
Apparently, the computer simulation also shows a cosmic-ly endowed wallcrawler, swinging from galaxy to galaxy.
I, for one, bow before our dark matter photino bird overlords from Andromeda...
Unless if the Xeelee get them first.
In general, the popular belief is that ALL of space is filled with "quantum foam", which contains a mass of virtual particles whose sum (over any statistically significant volume) will be zero. These virtual particles are not "dark matter", precisely for that reason - dark matter (if it exists) sums to extremely large values.
These virtual particles are of all sorts and would include quantum wormholes and quantum black holes amongst others. Now, although on average quantum foam has absolutely zero impact, it can have very local, short-lived effects. Hawking radiation would be one. It may be possible these local variations can account for everything "dark matter" has been attributed to.
"Empty space" contains (according to theorists) all sorts of other exotic phenomena. "Superstrings", for example, which have negative gravity and essentially fill all of the other functions attributed to "dark matter" PLUS being one step closer to unifying gravity with all of the other forces, at the cost of having to live in a twelve-dimensional universe (or is it 15, now? Superstring theorists keep adding more.)
Again, though, superstrings would eliminate the need for "dark matter" and would even be a "better" explanation for the odd layout of those galaxies. The antigravitational effect of superstrings would rip apart galaxies that weren't threaded, so threading is exactly what you'd expect. (I wonder if they're POSIX threads?)
These all assume, of course, that anything new is required at all. Current theories that require something to be present may simply be consequences of being based on observation, as observation requires something to be present to be observed. You cannot observe nothing, because you can never prove that it truly is nothing, only that it lacks all the somethings that you would normally observe.
The gravitational models of the galaxy that required "dark matter":
Now, it can be argued that that was not the only model that required "dark matter", but I will argue that if we keep the dark matter in, we now introduce errors by having variables that try to compensate for something that doesn't happen. I will also argue that cosmologists should verify that ALL of the factors I've listed have in fact been taken into account with all these other "dark matter" scenarios.
This is not to say I'm convinced by the other theories, either. I don't like adding large numbers of variables purely to eliminate other variables. That's messy and a sign of really bad science. The quantum foam, for my money, seems to be the "best" of a bunch of really screwball ideas, and is probably sufficient to account for all of the effects that everything else is intended to describe.
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)
Good show, sir. Send some mod points his way!
Sleep is futile.
Wow! So it really does exist...I just thought it was movie...
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
This is old news. Halton Arp (a famous and controversial astronomer) found this in the 1970s. But this discovery didn't fit with the galaxy models of the time (dark matter hadn't been introduced yet), so the finding was ignored.
Hell, no, they wouldn't. China has no interest at all in having the US nuked. They're making far too much money to want to disturb the status quo. This quite apart from the certainty that the US would be utterly bloody livid (yes, that's right... ninety-one thousand one hundred!), and the strong likelihood that they'd find out whose missile it was that just hit them...
The Chinese help North Korea because they don't want the place to collapse; if that happens, then at the very least they'll end up with hordes of starving refugees coming over the border, and it's more than possible that a desperate KJI would try something rash.
They'll keep North Korea alive, but only barely, and only because they don't want another war on their doorstep. Giving that maniac ICBMs does not help in that aim.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It was the first story from his "Xeelee Sequence" that I read, but I'm definitely reading more now!
...so above and beyond I imagine"
Maynard James Keenan
Could dark matter be the ley lines of the universe??
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
Eric J. Lerner is a plasma physicist and plasma cosmologist.
as this:
Eric J. Lerner is a plasma physicist and plasma cosmotologist.
My first thought was, 'Filaments of dark matter and a plasma cosmotologist. Won't be long before they're filaments of bleach blonde matter, then.' About that point I snapped back to reality. Wow.
--
It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.
--O. Henry (1862-1910)
What have monkeys ever done to you?
Let's say I give you 14 random points near Andromeda. What are the odds that you could pick 9 of them and find some "plane" that contains them all? I guess it depends on how thick the "plane" is (which the article doesn't say), but I bet it's not that hard.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
While adaptive optics can in general eliminate the smearing caused by the atmosphere and there have been telescopes with a larger aperture for ages, one significant problem remains:
Atmosphere simply stops some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, either completely or partially. In case of the Hubble, it can also perform observations in ultraviolet. And although the adaptive optics work wonders regarding the resolution, they can't remove the atmospheric glow and the daytime bright sky, though this is not as significant problem.
Also, Hubble does not have a big ball of rock and miscellaneous stuff blocking parts of the sky. (Well, strictly speaking, it does, but the Earth is a much smaller obstacle when viewed from orbit)
So, while the Earth-based telescopes can exceed the performance of current or near-future space telescopes in some areas, there are some problematic areas that can't be solved, at least for now.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.