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Astronomers Make Important Dark Matter Discovery

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the matter's-goth-sister dept.

saudadelinux writes "To quote a press release on NASA's site, astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered 'how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.' There will be a briefing at noon, August 21 ET, on this discovery, with streaming media provided by NASA, and some details of the research posted on Harvard's Chandra site just beforehand."

7 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Question. by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you shine a torch at some dark matter what does it become?

    Isn't dark matter just all the none illuminated items in the universe?
    Rocks and stones and humans and plants and animals and silicon and paper and all these things are what I would consider dark matter, I might be wrong but someone could add some illumination on the subject I would be most grateful.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
    1. Re:Question. by digitalhermit · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ever read Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light". In one of the chapters there's a story about battling an enemy that looks like a demon, is strong as a demon, is fast as a demon, etc.. It's not a called a demon, however. One character asks why they make the distinction when it doesn't matter how they go about fighting it (i.e., if it walks like a duck). The other character responds that it is all the difference. To say that it's a demon would be equivalent to "bowing down to the unknown". I.e., dispensing with science and knowledge and bowing to the supernatural. Excellent book.

    2. Re:Question. by mrpolecat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?" no one has mentioned Godel's Incompleteness Theorem yet... which taken to a logical conclusion would say that humans can't know about God. Apparently they're too stupid. Science starts from a position of ignorance. Religion starts from Omniscience. Or hubris

  2. Re:The whole day? by MustardMan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It says "noon"... maybe RTFS before trying for a first post?

  3. Re:Nothing to see, move along by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Chances are very good that it's an update to the results published by the same authors in the Astrophysical Journal in 2004, but using newer and much improved data. Pre-prints of the earlier papers are on astro-ph at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309303 and http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0312273. The papers from a few years ago combined observations of the gas in a merging cluster of galaxies with gravitational lensing data that indicates the distribution of the dark matter. As the two clusters in question merge, the gas from each cluster collides with that from the other, causing it to slow down. The dark matter, on the other hand, doesn't experience this sort of "drag" and just keeps on going, so the dark matter gets "ahead" of the gas.

  4. Re:Think that's bad? by wanerious · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IAAAstrophysicist, so perhaps a good chunk of my brain has been consumed already, but are you certain you mean *deuterium*? Is there a cite for this? I worked on galactic chemical evolution, and I'm a little out of touch with recent developments in the field, but this is news to me. Or maybe we're all really as dumb as you think we are.

  5. Wonder what Mordehai Milgrom will be saying by soxos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Although the press release says nothing, I would assume that there is some good evidence pointing to the detection of dark matter.

    In the August 2006 Discover magazine, there was an interesting piece about Mordehai Milgrom, a physicist who does not accept the dark matter theory. Basically, he has been able to retrofit Newton's equations to allow them to predict on the galactic scale (one of the reasons for the belief in dark matter). Being only an amateur physicist, I can't tell which method is the simpler, the one that only changes the equations, but (almost) no one buys, or the one that postulates the existence of matter that absorbs all electromagnetic energy. I can't wait to hear what this press release tells us.