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Giant Sheets Of Dark Matter Detected
Wandering Wombat writes "The largest structures in the universe have been, if not directly found, then at least detected and pounced upon by scientists. 'The most colossal structures in the universe have been detected by astronomers who tuned into how the structures subtly bend galactic light. The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form gigantic features stretching across more than 270 million light-years of space — three times larger than any other known structure and 2,000 times the size of our own galaxy. Because the dark matter, by definition, is invisible to telescopes, the only way to detect it on such grand scales is by surveying huge numbers of distant galaxies and working out how their images, as seen from telescopes, are being weakly tweaked and distorted by any dark matter structures in intervening space.' By figuring how to spot the gigantic masses of dark matter, hopefully we can get a better understanding of it and find smaller and smaller structures."
is it 1x4x9?
now I can finally get some fuel for my ship
you know the rest
Given that > 90% of the stuff out there is not even made of the same stuff like us - in the great scheme of things we are: ;) )
a) Interesting
b) Not interesting
c) Both (don't you love quantum superpositions
So now that they've spotted the large ones, perhaps they can get the queens and twins as well. Dark Matter would probably be a great seller amongst the goth/emo crowd--after all, once you've painted your walls black and gotten black carpets, it wouldn't do to have "My Little Pony" sheets, would it?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Take that MOND!
Soon all your adherents will have to move to studying a crazy theory that can't disproven, like String Theory!
What if it isn't dark matter at all? But the Universe actually bending? I read a description of the universe expanding like a snail building its shell... it doesn't expand in all directions infinitely but instead curls on itself like a snail shell.
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
Sheets of Dark Matter? I guess that's this season's goth clothing range sorted out then. Just when you thought it couldn't get any blacker than SuperBlack
What if dark matter is the supporting structure of the universe, kind of like a cell's cytoskeleton?
The Virgo Supercluster is 200 million light years in diameter. And I'm sure there are large superclusters known.
So we are to understand that dark matter, acted on only by gravity, forms sheets and filaments? We know very well what shapes distributions of particles form over time with only gravity acting on them and they look a lot like galaxies and very little like sheets and filaments. Can anyone clear this up for me?
so the scientists are lol cats? Oh, hai drk mater! i pownse on u!
The whole rubber sheet of space time analogy is wrong, it is missing something.
Current analogy of space time:
Take a rubber sheet and stretch it out over a frame and drop a bowling ball and marble and drop them on it, they push down and those dents are gravitation fields in space-time.
New more correct analogy:
Take a swimming pool and fill it all the way to the top with water. THEN, stretch a rubber sheet over it and seal it so that no water leaks out. Then put your bolwing ball and marble on it. Draw a line running between the bowling ball and marble, and take that cross section, note that the bowling ball and marble behave the same way at close distance like they do above, but when they are a opposite sides of the pool there is a slight "repulsive" effect. We call that Dark Energy! This repulsive effect also can help stick objects together applying a "pressure" against all the other objects, hence "Dark Matter". This effect will also affect light waves moving past it, hence gravitational lensing.
I'll take my Nobel prize now!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
So what's the thread count on these sheets? And no weaving multiple superstrings at a time to inflate the number please...
WTF? Were the scientists wearing kitten costumes?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
So they're seeing a slight lensing of distant objects and putting this down to dark matter? At those distances does the dark matter move enough to alter the light that much? I would have thought that even with adaptive optics, this would be within the margin of error of our own atmosphere's lensing.
We r in ur universe, messin with ur drk mattr sheetz.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
I don't mind no usage of the word "theory" on Slashdot or in the scientific press because the audience is likely to be familiar with the topic and know that it is not a "fact".
But you are right, the Discovery Channel is mainstream and should definitely point out that the theory is controversial, and that observational support for the theory is just now trickling in, an no one has any idea what the heck it even IS.
Then again, this is a channel that regularly runs silly supernatural phenomena shows.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And yet you still came here and read it anyway. Even commented on it.
I guess severe nausea doesn't necessarily stop someone from being a complete douchebag after all.
If you're on Slashdot looking for facts, you're on the wrong website.
Misinformation makes you angry. When you tell me you want to puke after you walk in on your mom giving your dad (what I later learned was called) the rusty trombone, THEN I feel sympathy for you - not before.
If you feel like the government is watching you, they're not. They're watching everyone! Stop BIG BROTHER!
I typically consider myself Interesting, but I never really know for sure until mod points are assigned. Occasionally, I'm Funny, Insightful, Informative, or Overrated... Sometimes all at the same time!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Aha..so that's where Xenu is hiding...call Tom Cruise, quick!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
...I assume dark matter/energy will make more sense if and when we can unify the relativity & quantum theories?
...come on LHC, give us the HiggsBoson damn you! ;?)
I say this only because dark matter is "seen" by it's effects on other particle due to it's gravitational properties,
not it's electromagnetic properties, ie, light doesn't interact directly with it, hence "dark".
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
It may be dark, and it may be matter, but it's clearly pretty darn transparent to light and other electromagnetic frequencies we are observing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You are throwing up your hands WAY too soon and crying occam's razor.
Atmospheric distortions are not consistent over time or different locations and those distortions do not "lense" like gravity does. Also standard astronomic technique is to have someone confirm your results with a different telescope, in a different part of the world.
It may not be dark matter, but it's not a smudge on their mirror either.
The journal article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20078522
Before covering it with the rubber be sure to have a bunch of friends jump in and run around in a circle to create a whirlpool effect like what might easily be seen if you had the vast majority of galactic mass swirling around in a galaxy.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Giant invisible sheets of what the fuck? So are we like in the Kingdom Hearts universe now where different sections of the universe have an invisible separating barrier between them and Goofy lives somewhere in the next galaxy?
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The evidence for gravitational lensing is much stronger than that. In the most extreme images, we can actually see multiple images of a single source. In this image, there are four copies of the distant quasar because of the lensing of the closer galaxy (center of image). Even though gravitational lensing is a fairly small effect, given the massive distances we're talking about, the deviations are readily measurable.
Also, many of the measurements come from Hubble images, for which there is no atmospheric turbulence to deal with (atmospheric effects also average-out over a fairly short period of time, and though they decrease resolution they are easy to differentiate from astronomical sources of distortion).
The error bars are small enough that we know the light from distant sources is being deflected. The simplest explanation is that there is a cluster of mass between us and the source, whose gravity is deflecting the light.
This is as close to making it up as Physics has gotten in a while. Feh.
Really, I'm waiting for the face they find on one of the sheets.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Holly: Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
Rimmer: But five of them? Five massively collapsed stars, millions of miles across. How could you miss them?
Holly: It's typical, isn't it? You wait three million years with nothing, then five come along all at once.
You are throwing up your hands WAY too soon and crying occam's razor.
The same way the scientists are crying dark matter.
It may not be dark matter, but it's not a smudge on their mirror either.
The point being that it could be any number of other things.
What does "I would have thought" have to do with anything? Have you actually performed the calculations to work out how much lensing you'd expect to see from atmospheric effects and compare that with gravitational lensing?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Cut out a couple of holes and you've got a cool Halloween costume.
Logic, macros, and more
Or at least our current mathematical description of it is wrong. We cannot explain how disk galaxies spin. We cannot explain how the big bang happens without the magic fairy dust for inflation. Now we have a large wall of dark matter. Oh, and there is dark energy for galaxy acceleration. One more thing, we cannot quantize our approach to gravity.
These are the reasons I work on a rank 1 field theory for gravity. For the details, read as much of this thread as you like: http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=87097 This is a LONG thread, more than 36k views, I make learn things along the way. Right now I am trying to find derive the Maxwell equations, and then the unified field theory, instead of using tensors. Quite a bit of fun. I have never had to write so many partial differential equations in my life.
Doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
are real!
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The Electric Sky: Donald E. Scott
The Electric Universe
Electric universe/plasma cosmology ftw~
Did someone say "Monolith" ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Who showed them my bed?!
Right, these are definitely externally-caused aberrations.
But these "filaments" obviously aren't dark matter, they're warp-drive starship wakes (you know, the reason why the Federation imposed a Warp 5 speed limit).
-- Alastair
No, you are not. Damn that's the dumbest thing I've read on Slashdot in a while. You aren't a physicist, okay? Don't pretend like you have any idea what you're talking about. Don't assume that you know more than Ph.D.s who've been studying this shit for decades. They've seen the effects in all directions around us, you saying there's brown dwarfs hiding out in all directions? Just shut up, you're making Slashdot a stupider place with your very presence.
You joke, but consider if the universe were a simulation -- quantum mechanics makes a lot more sense in term of a simulation. Things like spooky action at a distance become lazy evaluation. Quanta become memory locations, variables. And so on. Quantum mechanics is easy to simulate.
But how does one simulate gravity? It has to propagate in every direction at the something like speed of light or else -- god forbid -- information could travel faster than light. The whole concept of gravity, that every individual particle affects however slightly every other particle, is not possible to compute directly.
Now suppose the universe were simulated as a sparse matrix. Each cell could contain a gravity component that stored the aggregate gravity force from each of a certain number of directions (perhaps expressed as several point masses). Depending on the number of directions this would give highly accurate simulation at a small scale, where error is absorbed as noise, while being computable for the overall universe as a whole. However the error would magnify over great distances due to 'floating point' type errors accumulating.
What if what these people are seeing as dark matter is not matter at all, but simulation error. Perhaps even dark matter is related to a sparse simulation of the universe where intervening space is approximated by invisible masses that gravity affects but nothing else does. These mass would act to consolidate cells in the matrix to reduce the overall memory requirements.
Just coming in: seemingly, the gigantic filaments were just strains of hair attached to the telescope lenses...
I don't feel like it...
*musing*
Well, it it was warm, and fuzzy, and inside you... you probably would puke, so I guess these clauses are synonymous.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Just throwing this out there, what if the dark matter that we are just now finding ways to detect and evaluate is the result of a species or device that is converting all available matter and energy in the universe to something such as replicators? Maybe this is the way the universe ends. Similar to any number of science fiction books that predict nanobots will result in the earth becoming covered by a gray goo which is the the result of nanobot deconstructors and constructors turning all raw material into more nanobots. It is probably just a matter of time before our galaxy intersects with one of these dark matter structures and the replicators take hold on this world and all others in this galaxy.
Another possibility is that the dark matter is nothing more than massive dyson spheres which surround all the stars that should be seen but can not because advanced species have created structures to capture all the energy of the stars in their sectors. Again, bad for us when they intersect our galaxy since they will quickly consume all the raw materials in our solar system and galaxy.
...come to the Dark Matter Side.
I think what the scientists are observing is the scaffolding used by the construction workers. The entire universe is getting a make over for the release of Universe 2.0
I was pretty sure that the largest "dark" structure in the universe was previously discovered in 1991. We ate a HUGE meal at the Pancho's All-You-Can-Eat Mexican Buffet in Dallas one day that summer. Later, on the flight back to Sacramento, one of my colleagues boasted that he had just deposited perhaps the largest "dark matter" structure ever seen during his recent sojourn in the aft lavatory. Apparently this new discovery does him one better, but perhaps the data requires a bit more scrubbing before we can be certain.
I found out what it is: Renova Black! This scale version is available: http://www.renovaonline.net/portfolio/prod2.php?cat=5&pd=228&org=RNV&lang=UK&cor=1 As for the big one, well, god must be a very classy guy indeed.
> The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form gigantic features stretching
> across more than 270 million light-years of space
The Silver Surfer could surf that far in less than a second! Even if he created a black hole, which is easy to do, both Superman and the Hulk can hold a black hole in their hand!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I shouldn't have eaten those burritos yesterday. Sorry for the Dark Matter, guys...
So from what I gather, this is still more pie in the sky from dark matter proponents then? It has been argued that we don't need dark matter to explain the universe, and that a minor tweaking of Newton's law of universal gravitation would explain everything. As of yet, no one has truly detected/demonstrated dark matter particles.
If our fundamental laws are a bit off, then this bending/distorting of the light would be explained by that, and these dark matter constructions would be nothing but an illusion created by a mathematical error in our first principles. Therefore, until someone can actually demonstrate a dark matter particle, I am not jumping on this bandwagon. There are experiments underway to actually find dark matter, and for now I await their results.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
So is light supposed to pass through dark matter? I mean, if there is so much of this stuff out there, it ought to be doing a lot more than just lensing light. It ought to be flat out blocking it. I mean, how does light just pass through matter (because dark matter is still considered matter), especially such huge objects with such large mass?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
It's sort of like there were vast strings or sheets of glass prisms out there messing up the images of the galaxies, with more distortion corresponding to a greater number of prisms.
Is it the shape that is being bent, or colors "scattered" like prisms, or both? Why would gravity "bend" different wavelengths differently? Glass prisms do that due to how a given wavelength interacts with crystal sizes in the glass molecules. It's thus a function of crystal molecule size and the wave-LENGTH of different colors IIRC. But there is no crystal structure in dark matter......is there? Dark crystals? Sounds like a game.
Table-ized A.I.
Ah, the joy of idiots discussing physics.
There is such a thing as knowing just enough to sound intelligible, but being a complete idiot while trying to sound intelligent.
*shakes head*
Seriously, go watch porn or something.
The point is that the phenomenon is occuring out in space on a huge scale at a huge distance. It is not something occuring on Earth or even in our solar system.
I agree that "dark matter" is not necessarily the cause. It could be a gravity wave or some other mechanism not associated with mass.
Ordy: No! You killed my father
Dark Matter: Ordy... I am your father
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
so it must be a table seems to be the logic behind dark matter to me. Ive read allot about dark matter and Im coming to the opinion that it doesnt exist. My personal take (and others) is what we are observing are the effects of complex interactions between our dimension of space time and others.
Off-topic? This is profoundly deep sarcastic commentary on the Slashdot topic and reader total gestalt package.
To: God
Dear omnipotent one.
Would you please install more memory? Also, you may need to reboot THE server. There seems to be some anomalies being discovered in our Universe-matrix.
PS. before our matrix ends in the distant future, can you migrate us to another relm/simulation? Also, we need FTL travel capability. Please patch our simulation and provide us the change.log file to make use of it. Thanks.
From: Slashdot.org
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah, I'm sure the people who did the measurements have never heard of atmospheric lensing, much less accounted for it!
I for one, welcome our new Dark Matter Overlords.
My god, it's full of stars.
I've found out where all my black ballpoints have gone to.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Are belong to us.
I ain't believing in no darn darkmatter 'til I see some photos!!
This text has been written completely with recycled bits and bytes.
"vast sheets of dark matter"
Or did they just forget to take the lens cap off?
The dark matter, by definition, is invisible by telescope. But why does human consciousness need to check it. It could be perceived by mind but what's really our mind formats? Is our mind de Broglie wave, born and coming to surviellence the universe. It is absolutely that we are in a mind journey not a possible space journey. Time is the most weird figure in universe. Think basically that our civilization is just switched ON 10.000 years and we have to detect huge numbers of time 13.700.000.000 years. But we are lucky that LIFE itself has huge numbers 3.800.000.000 ~ 4.500.000.000 years. Human consciousness is clearly SWITCHED-ON EVENT PHENOMENON and it will be someday SWITCHED-OFF. Do not forget that we have only figure 10.000 years. Mind itself is the most urgent to be deciphered clearly. Dark matter or dark energy? I think life and human civilization are the top agenda in universe, not empty space with huge mass or huge energy. It was the past time but we need to memorize it.
Somehow I'm imagining that if the galaxies were hauling ass across the universe, somebody would actually notice.
Like we do growing a seed of plant, it needs sun energy and water-based matter to grow a plant. A born star also needs dark energy/matter to grow,not only their burn-nuke fuel, it creates balance process in universe. A seed of life is analogically with a seed of galactical-star, it creates chains-reaction from 1 to be trillion. Think how to make it balance the process of chains-reaction, it could be dark energy/matter participation.
Most religions outlooked the day-after final, and we've noted in mind that we just live only 10.000 years of civilization and how we can challenge figure of 3.8 ~ 13.7 bya? It is simply our mind journey have measured the huge time-table, the huge mass-energy, invisible dark energy/matter, but for what? I always think that human mind is analogically as recorded-camera but there are 2 monitor, one monitor for human itself and the other monitor is God in dimensions of universe consciousness. So I believe when a scientist is watching and thinking about Milky-Way, there are two watchers, it can be expressed as Z = R + jX. Real R watcher is human mind and and Imaginary jX watcher is infinite universe consciousness. I just simply think that we've only 10.000 years very short time-table, it looks like human mind is only TIME-CLOCK-WATCHER OF FIGURE 13.700.000.000 YEARS, we've successfully defined it 10.000 - 4.500.000.000 - 13.700.000.000 and someday we will meet again in next 10.000 years time-table. Do not forget Aristotle syllogism. http://www.geocities.com/memorigin/Aristotle.htm
And then there would also be no relativistic mass effect in our reference frame. That's what "relativity" means.