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

Re:Am I smarter than a Scientist?

[ILuvRamen]

Go back to your cave, troll. Astronomers prove themselves wrong every day. They make up imaginary rules and theories with no basis and then bitch when they get proven wrong. Remember the recent "no planet can be X distance from a star if it's over a certain mass" rule that someone pulled out of their ass? There was absolutely no reason for anyone to think it was true other than the fact that they hadn't seen it yet so they assumed that was some astromonical law. And as seen in slashdot recently, they were proven wrong. That's like me saying dolphins don't exist because I've never seen one and then oh crap, there's a dolphin, I guess they do exist.
Here's how theories like this get created. Some scientist makes up the most outrageous, far out, ridiculous theory to explain something they've witnessed in space and they're the one that gets the coverage and the book sales and the documentary contracts because that's the most entertaining. Logically they should just go with the simplest explanation. If you look at any part of this particular load of crap, you'll notice that there's holes all over it. What they witnessed was light's path being warped...that's it. So from that, the simplest explanation must be a giant cloud of an undiscovered form of gravity inducing matter in the middle of nowhere that's bigger than a galaxy? Give me a break! Light passing over a what 250 million lightyear cloud super far away will look identical to light being warped by a way, way closer object like a black hole or brown dwarf and that's way more likely. It's all basic trigonometry. And yes, it can be happening from multiple directions at once. Here's another thinker for you. How can they tell that X galaxy's light is being bent so it appears to be 5 degrees off from it's real location if they don't know it's real location because they can't see it? For all they know, the light isn't even being bent by gravity and it's warped or disrupted (or whatever they witnessed) another way.