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."

Comments

So ...

[supun]

is it 1x4x9?

Re:So ...

[AKAImBatman]

Actually, it's just the walls of the Universe. The simulation uses a 32 bit number to handle the coordinate system, so it needed to fit within 2^32 light years. I told God he should have used a 64-bit processor, but he complained that they were too expensive back in 1970. I bet he's kicking himself now, eh?

Heh

[TheLink]

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 ;) )

pounced upon?

[Numbah One]

so the scientists are lol cats? Oh, hai drk mater! i pownse on u!

Re:pounced upon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of scientists are lol cats, remember Schrödinger's lolcat? I can has superposishun?

Re:The Rubber sheet analogy is WRONG!!!

[Wandering Wombat]

Scientists never get invited to pool parties... you're just making them feel bad now.

Makes a lot of sense, though.

Re:The Rubber sheet analogy is WRONG!!!

[TobyRush]

Scientists never get invited to pool parties...

And there's good reason. I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, and the best part about doing our swimming merit badges at the county pool was having the dad of one of the scouts -- a LANL physicist -- come early to pick up his son. He'd have all of us at the shallow end of the pool, and he'd be standing there holding a pendulum. Based on the pendulum's swing, he'd either yell "jump in!" and we'd all jump in simultaneously, or "get out" and we'd all get out simultaneously. After doing this for four or five minutes, the entire pool was sloshing back and forth, spilling over onto the deck on each end, getting everyone's towels wet if they weren't on the bleachers.

We thought it was awesome. The lifeguards didn't.