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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!
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.
"North Korea is making far bigger noises about making their own nuclear bombs, but no one seems to make such a fuss ...."
[OT, Sorry.]
Um, yeah, that's because several countries have diplomatic relations with NK and are negotiating with them. The US is actually doing the right thing here (or at least what everybody wanted them to do with regards to Iraq), but nobody wants to acknowledge that because of the monkey in the White House.
"Derp de derp."
Yes, well of course - lots of money needs to be saved so that there will be the budget to blast Iran in a few months time.
Fixed that for you.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"Dark matter does not exist. That is all."
Are you one of the Men in Black???
(Bad joke. I'm sorry.)
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
Shouldnt that be the job of the people being governed?
Isn't the whole problem that is doesn't exist? (Hence the "anti")
A totalitarian govt makes that hard to do though. Do you think the French could have overthrown the Nazis all alone (not bashing France btw)?
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Oh ya...good point :P
At least there will be plenty of french whores to go around... The arabs have a thing for blonds though, you may have to fight for them.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
That, and the fact it we don't want to be fighting wars on two different fronts. Chances are, we will deal with N. Korea with military means once we are sure Europe can take on Iran. It's WWIII, I'm bloddy serious.
That is so utterly wrong I can't even begin to put words to it. The US will never ever deal with North Korea militarily unless North Korea attacks another nation.
People forget that the capital of South Korea is in artillery range of North Korea. North Korea has a massive amount of chemical and biological weapons at its disposal. In any attack, North Korea would intentionally inflict massive civilian casualties on South Korea has it dumped chemical and conventional rounds into heavily populated zones with artillery and missiles. Further, you can pretty much rest assure that if North Korea will fire on Tokyo with chemical weapons and nukes.
There will be no war with North Korea. Every nation in the region would step in to stop it, South Korea, Japan, and China included. When I say "stop it" I don't just mean "apply diplomatic pressure". I mean they would physically stop it with force of arms if they had to. Of course, that isn't going to be a problem because no president or congress would ever be so insane as to destroy the world economy by drowning some of the largest economies in Asia (Japan and South Korea) in a chemical cloud and receiving sanctions from all the others (China and everyone else).
The idea that the US would ever invade North Korea is utterly inane. The only thing North Korea could ever do to provoke a response from the US would be to nuke the US. I imagine at that point our response wouldn't be invasion, it would be glassing.
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
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.
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.
You don't know the power of the dark side...
Oh well, what the hell...
If N. Korea started to attack first, we would not fight a conventional warfare. They would be stopped frozen in their tracks once a few nuclear bombs wipe out all major cities. Fuck politics, this is war at this point. This stratagy would be the ONLY effective one against N. Korea. After the fact, then everyone would move the troops in to take out the rouge remaining forces.
That is the point. North Korea wont initiate a war because it would go nuclear. The US wont initiate a war because it would involve the destruction of much of South Korea and a hunk of Japan. Claiming in your earlier post that there is going to be a war is silly. Neither side is going to fight. North Korea doesn't gain anything out of attacking South Korea and could never win such a fight. The US won't attack North Korea because North Korea would retaliate by destroying much of South Korea with chemical and nuclear weapons.
The two simply won't fight. There is no war coming to North Korea.
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
Nice troll, I'll bite anyway since you had to invoke Godwin. The French could not have overthrown the Nazis alone, but the Germans could have. Revolutions do happen, though they are difficult in a totalitarian state. The French did once overthrow their oppressive regime. To address your comment, the US et al would step in if N. Korea invaded S. Korea.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
News for Nerds. Stuff that's dark.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
It was the first story from his "Xeelee Sequence" that I read, but I'm definitely reading more now!
> Matter = Stuff Anti-Matter = Stuff that blows stuff up Dark Matter = The stuff that isn't there, that we keep bumping into
To paraphrase the old saw about virtual memory:
If you can see it and it's there, it's matter.
If you can see it and it's not there, it's a virtual particle.
If you can't see it and it's there, it's dark matter.
If you can't see it and it's not there, it's dark energy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...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...
The "Cold War" was WWIII. Now we are engaged in WWIV, in which Islamo-Fascism endeavors to destroy Western Civilization, and its main proponent, the United States. Wake up, what's that sound? Be politically correct - don't look 'round....
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)
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.