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Hubble Telescope Maps Dark Matter in 3D
dido writes "The BBC reports that the Hubble Space Telescope has been used to make a map of the dark matter distribution of the universe, providing the best evidence of the role dark matter plays in the structure and evolution of the universe. From the article: 'According to one researcher, the findings provide "beautiful confirmation" of standard theories to explain how structures in the Universe evolved over billions of years.'"
Pluto is still not a planet.
*bitter*
clifgriffin > blog
According to one researcher, the findings provide "beautiful confirmation" of standard theories to explain how structures in the Universe evolved over billions of years.'
... thereby proving god exists.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I wonder what a 3d model of dark matter around a black hole would look like? Does it share the same properties as regular matter near a black hole?
I'm woefully ignorant on this, but is there any evidence towards the existence of dark matter, or is it something that would be necessary in order for certain theories on the composition of the universe to work?
To those /.ers that know more of physics than I do, is Dark Matter supposed to be some actual particle, or is it a kind of natural gravitational topography? Everything I read ( quick google search/old copy of "Elegant Universe") about it seems to be rather vague and mysterious.
We are all just people.
"beautiful confirmation" of standard theories?????
What standard theories? Dark matter does not exist, as least not as far as anyone (except astronomers with good imaginations) knows. There is a very nice (and complete!) standard model of physics, and dark matter holds no place.
I should qualify, I'm talking about theroes of non-baryonic dark matter and even worse dark energy.
Regular matter, that is simply dark - i.e. cold, and not emiting light, does not bother me. But making up particles no one has ever seen just because you don't understand what you are seing is fitting facts to the data.
Scientists often discuss new theories, etc, and in that context dark matter has it's place, but to claim it exists - as this story does - without being able to actually measure anything is quite silly and premature. If you don't understand something, say so, don't invent plausable explanations that have nothing supporting them except your lack of knowledge.
-Ariel
The map streches back to half the life-span of this universe. That means that if a single unit of a radioactive atom exists in the universe with just the right value...
Uh-oh! It just reached half-life! Nasa better hurry up and find this long lasting nuclear element before its lost forever. We wasted the first half of this universe's existance, lets not waste the second.
Oh wait...this statement would only be true if the universe was ending at exactly this moment and the hubble did this scan half-a-universe's-life-span ago.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
"We understand statistically what those galaxies are supposed to look like,"
So this map is based on what they assume the universe should look like. Then they use how its different to find where the dark matter might be. Doesnt sound 100% certain by any means, but its a nice picture.
Are all the "solid" areas of the 3d shape a roughly similar density of dark matter?
Seems to me there would be a wide range of density distributions. If so there must have been a human decision to decide
which level of density constitutes matter vs. empty space in this 3d depiction. I wonder how the 3d shape would change
if we arbitrarily moved this balance point of requisite density up or down the scale.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I don't know how much weight this "dark matter" theory holds (pun intended). But I was immediately interested when I saw their translucent blue 3d render of the stuff.
I wonder how many other people that works for...
You should call it "Light Challenged" matter in this age of political correctness. Be more sensitive to other matter people!
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
Here.
I've tried to find something about whether this tells us something new about the properties of dark matter, but so far no luck. Anyone have a link to something more informative?
Here are the press release links: Nature, Hubble Space Telescope, European Space Agency and Subaru Telescope. The COSMOS project web page can be found there.
Maybe because Dark matter doesn't damn you to hell for wanting to have sex? Or because it is not based on campfire tales of desert nomads from thousands of years ago, but rather mathematical equations, observations, you know, scientific stuff.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
It misses one of the four fundamental forces of nature. You know, an unimportant little thing we call "gravity." Naturally, if there's a particle that only interacts gravitationally, it would also have to be missing from the standard model.
There's also the unresolved matter of actually observing a little particle that is in the Standard Model called the Higgs boson.
Trust me, the standard model is really really good, but it's far from complete.
Why is it easier for Slashdotters to believe in dark matter than it is to accept another's believe in a God?
Dark matter doesn't make a claim on one's life. The other replier who said, "dark matter doesn't damn you to hell for wanting to have sex", while wrong, illustrates this point. "If God doesn't want what I want then screw Him/Her/It/Them".
and why is it a related link? Is there something special about dido@@@imperium...ph?
Dark matter is becoming as household a term as "black hole". But what makes it dark? It's matter that doesn't interact with electromagnetism, so we can't see it - though its gravitation makes it detectable by other means. But what kind of matter doesn't interact with electromagnetics? Have we ever physically obtained any? Synthesized any? And supposedly something like 70% of the dark "matter" is energy. How does non-dark energy interact with electromagnetism, where the dark "stuff" does not?
--
make install -not war
Next time you get an infection, please do us all a favor and take the ID challenge: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.ht ml?uc_full_date=20060702
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
This dark material bends light in much the same way as light is bent when travelling through a lens.
Anyone else read this as... This dark material bends light in much the same way as light is bent when travelling through aliens.
I will forever be a student.
I thought that we weren't 100% certain that dark matter even exists
Technoli
Well, while I don't have the time to explain the complex equations, dark matter is simply the substance that makes up the Flying Spaghetti Monster's two delicious meat balls. Praise His Noodliness. And don't worry, Pastafarians have flimsy moral standards. FSM doesn't care if you have sex- evidence? Heaven has a Beer Volcano and Stripper Factories..
Praise His Noodliness. RAmen.
Have you read Darwin? You do understand that according to the theory, speciation occurs over vast periods of time, and in the short term, this occurs through adaptation, right? If you get that much, you must understand that your gripe boils down to this: we can't have adequate evidence that something occurs without watching the process from beginning to end, and thus observation of adaptation plus the fossil record plus common genes shared between distinct species isn't good evidence.
If that's your position, please let me know the next time God shows up at your house; I have some complaints I'd like to make.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
Why are we using the hubble to spy on Nibbler using the litter box.
"Dark Wings, Dark Words"
Some skepticism is certainly in order. Since we currently have no way of independently confirming the existence of dark matter, we also have no way of distinguishing between two possible cases: one case is that dark matter corresponds to some real, physical material; the other is that the theory of gravity we're using is flawed. The fact that a better theory of gravity hasn't been produced doesn't mean that the current one is correct.
There are pretty strong parallels between dark matter and the infamous epicycles. The case for epicycles was about as strong as that for dark matter: epicycles were a construction required to make the theory work, but there was no way to independently verify their existence, and they turned out to be essentially fictitious (assuming one doesn't take the position that they could be turned into a valid way of describing the solar system's orbital motion taking the Earth as center.)
The real problem is that there are no checks and balances here: by adjusting the mass distribution of dark matter, we can get whatever result we want, and there's nothing to either prove or disprove the proposed distribution. It's the ultimate hack, since it can be adjusted to suit every individual galaxy we observe.
In the absence of independent evidence of dark matter, it would be more elegant if laws of gravity were discovered which explained the observations well without dark matter.
That's a pretty weak position. It certainly doesn't do anything to counter the accusation that objects are being invented just to make the theory work.
---> . Always nice to know where you are, right?
Physicists and cosmologists searching for a "unifying theory" of the universe are, in my assessment, searching for the exact same thing as people who believe in God. For religious people, their god is their unifying theory. Dark matter, and dark energy, are their latest fictional creations to justify their obsessive need to find certainty.
This Hubble "map" is a CONSTRUCTION. It's not actual evidence; it proves nothing. I just love how the "anomalies" are discussed so dismissively, as if they aren't the crack in the dike threatening to bring the whole house of cards down.
I'm really sick of religious fanatics masquerading as "scientists".
Galactic dark matter has a problem called MOND. If we don't agree with MOND on the galactic scale then we need to obtain MOND from our theories of formation of dark matter, because MOND agrees very well with the observed galactic data, even predicting the very low dark matter and the very high dark matter ratios obtained for the different galaxies, which this report calls problematic.
See http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/ for further information on MOND.
now I can hang my map of dark matter up right next to my picture of albino polar bears walking the tundra in a blizzard.
ôó
Why do people think that dark matter still exists? Has everyone forgotten we're looking at light which is millions, even billions of years old? The fact that we're inventing "dark matter" to explain inaccuracies in light which has moved billions of AU through billions of years.. it's just bloody stupid. the phenomena which dark matter tries to explain only really says that something has happened to the light while traveling through space, probably some kind of expansion or change in the time/space continuum, which is more interesting from a historical perspective regarding the universe, and in my view not indicative of "dark matter". Dark matter must be one of the dumbest popular 'belief' in astrophysics, and is only hindering people from trying to find the real reason for why the light has changed its' course this way in the universes history. Sometimes I think people forget we're looking at reflections of objects millions of years old, and millions of lightyears away.. not the objects themselves. K.
Here's HubbleSite's full release on the topic -- more comprehensive than the BBC article imo: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2007/01/
See this post for links about the status of MOND vs. dark matter. In short: not looking good for pure MOND, although MOND + dark matter might be possible — but that kind of defeats the purpose of MOND.
I think you are extremely confused about what dark matter is and what evidence supports it.
Your theory has been proposed, but nobody has been able to come up with new laws of physics that can explain the observations without dark matter, and it's not for lack of trying.
Galaxys clump more than they should or even form never mind keep their distinctive shape given the current theory of gravitation. Rather than update Newton they invent dark matter. There is also the case of that probe that is leaving the solar system faster that it should. Does dark matter account for that too. Why don't they just bring back the aether.
"Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a theory that explains the galaxy rotation problem without assuming the existence of dark matter"
"'Ether' returns in a bid to oust dark matter"
davecb5620@gmail.com
These clever chaps have done just that.
They actually mapped it.
On 3D!
If it was a hack, it would be one of the cleverest, more accurate hacks in the history of science.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They just mapped the damn thing.
On 3D.
How do you explain that?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
LOL! Well put.
The real heart of the problem is that we're believing *everything* that we're being told by a group of people without critically thinking about it. People have *total* faith in organizations and people like NASA, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, etc. We are a brand name loyalty culture. In other words, we've been trained by the PR industry since the 20's to believe in the brand rather than questioning the message. Back in the 20's, people only bought the stuff they needed. Buying something that you didn't need didn't seem necessary. So, the PR industry was born here in the United States to convince the public to buy things that they didn't need. This created brand names and this brand name loyalty has seeped into every aspect of our culture. When you think of IBM, you think of guys in suits and mainframe computers. When you think of Nike, you think of shoes, that swoosh symbol and maybe even sweatshops. When you think of black holes, you probably think of Stephen Hawking, his books and maybe some shows you've seen about them on Nova or Discovery Channel. When you think of the Sun, most people imagine a nuclear reaction. And most importantly, when you hear the term "astrophysics", you imagine things that you cannot possibly understand -- and most people don't even try. Your brain switches from critically thinking to listening and memorizing. We've been brainwashed in a sense to not think about what we're being told about space because we've been told that it's just far too complicated to understand. And sure enough, if you try to talk to astrophysicists or intelligent amateur astronomers about it, they will oftentimes try to scare you out of your preposterous notions of electricity in space -- as if you are some sort of threat to them -- by invoking all sorts of exotic physics. You'll oftentimes notice that they don't care if you actually *understand* what they're saying; they would prefer that you don't because then you'll get out of their way so that they can go back to their work. This process has led to conformity within astrophysics, but the problem is that conformity is the enemy of science. The last thing we want to be doing is voting on science. Science is best when scientists are left to believe what they want and pursue those beliefs as they see fit. Some form of peer review is necessary to weed out the pseudoscience, but pseudoscience can accidentally creep into the peer review process itself when the scientists stop *listening* to the other intelligent people around them. And this is where things stand now.
They laughed at Velikovsky even though he made accurate predictions about Jupiter and Venus that were completely unexpected. Carl Sagan frequently claimed in his arguments against Velikovsky that ancient astronomical-literate cultures who recorded the arrival of Venus were not smart enough to accurately understand the movements of planets. They ignored Alfven even though he earned a Nobel Prize and most astrophysicists are to this day so unaware of his recusal from magnetohydrodynamics that they sometimes refer to magnetic reconnections as "Alfvenic reconnection". And they similarly scoffed at Wallace Thornhill's accurate predictions for the Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 even though they have yet to offer any real alternative explanation that can include all of the observations made. When an amateur astronomer coincidentally took a picture of the Space Shuttle Columbia's plasma tail lit up by upper atmosphere lightning at the exact moment that the Shuttle malfunctioned, NASA refused to believe it, arguing that upper atmospheric lightning should not exist and they never heard the lightning on their instruments anyways. Time after time, they've decided that they knew better than the people around them when in fact they might have been wise to listen. Their field is, after all, interdisciplinary.
And so, here we are: pouring millions of dollars into fairy tale imaginary objects that capture the imagination of the public and ma
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.