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Space Observatory May Have Found Dark Matter
KentuckyFC writes to mention that new data from the orbiting observatory PAMELA may shed some additional light on the question of dark matter. Still only a preliminary announcement, the new findings apparently support the "Minimal Dark Matter" model, in which a particle called a "Wino" is responsible.
The answer is none. None more darker.
Thats right, when you can't find the real reason blame those too drunk to respond.
Winos are not responsible for every single badass event in the universe you know.
It could just as easily have been this Pamela woman.
liqbase
Can someone astrophysically informed explain how the charged wino can be a dark matter candidate? Photons would interact with it through its charge, now? Or are they talking about the zino (same link)?
Back when I was in particle physics, we would pronounce "wino" to rhyme with neutrino, but we would still snicker about it.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
Wino is a recursive acronym for "Wino Is Not Observable"
I've always heard the opposite
I'm afraid the OP was correct. You can't shed light on dark matter because the dark will suck all the light, just like the sun sucks dark so hard that the friction of the dark moving to the sun causes it to become very hot. The flow of dark towards the sun interrupted by the earth causes the side of the earth away from the sun to accumulate dark, thus causing Night. As the earth rotates the dark caught on the night side can then be pulled off, this causing the absence of dark known as Day.
What we call light bulbs are truly dark suckers as well. That is why light bulbs are hot, just like the sun. When a light bulb is full of dark and won't suck dark any more, it cools off. If you look in old light bulbs you can even seen the accumulation of dark.
And when he said shed some dark on the matter of light mass, shed some mass in order to become become light I think he was referring to the fact that dark is heavier than water (in the oceans, the deeper you go, the darker it gets).
I don't know about lighting dark sheds bit, though. Maybe someone else?
Galactic clusters do not appear to have enough mass to account for their speeds. Similarly, Galactic rotation curves flatten out as if galaxies were shaped spherical balls, even though we can see they are discs. The very first thing that astronomers reached for to explain these phenomena was as yet unseen, or "dark" matter.
Personally (I am a lay person astronomically), I think Dark Matter raises more questions than it answers. While I acknowledge the effort, time and rigor that many astrophysicists have put into studying these phenomena, I still feel that dark matter, a substance which is invisible, intangible, and undetectable expect through its gravitational effects is too far of a step for physics to take without more evidence. I feel as a theory, dark matter is only a stepping stone on the way to a better explanation for what we are observing.
I think the theory has fed off its own inertia. While "Dark Matter" was proposed in the 1930's by Zwicky, he meant it only in the classical sense, i.e. dust, dim stars, etc. The dark matter we hear about today seems to be a product of the 1970s, and is I think a result of the influx of particle physicists into the discipline of cosmology beginning in that period. The particle physics community has had a history of success using assumptions and models that are counterintuitive and often bizarre. The idea we hear most of today of more "exotic" and inscrutable dark matter stems I think from this camp.
The proposal of alternative theories has also ironically lead to wider acceptance of dark matter. By proposing alternatives, sides and factions were created, as will always happen among groups of people when topics are in dispute. When a theory like MOND fails in a particular case, this has the effect of strengthening confidence in the Dark Matter model, even though it should do nothing of the sort. Only sold predictions which emerge from a model should inspire confidence in it, and despite all the fanfare, we have no way of measuring dark matter, even indirectly. The distribution of the dark matter "halos" or spheres, is still an unknown, and some galaxies do not appear to need dark matter at all.
All that said, Feynman's rebuttal still applies. The laws of nature do not have to be philosophically pleasing to us. The universe does not exist for our mental gratification. It can be as strange as it wants to be, and if we don't like it, that's out tough luck. So if dark matter makes predictions, and they fit the data we see, then it is a good model no matter how strange its premises.
All that said, at this time I would bet on a better theory emerging at some later date. Exotic matter, while it may work in subatomic circles, will not I think stand up to scrutiny in the macroscopic domain.
May the Maths Be with you!
It has worked in the past, though. Remember how the observed motion of Uranus differed from the predicted motion? A hypothesis was put forward that the difference was due to the gravitational effects of a large body of dark matter. After some mathematical work, the likely location of the dark matter was deduced, someone went to a telescope and had a look - and there it was. Time to crack open the champagne and think of a name for it, how about 'Neptune'?
It has failed in the past too: the motion of Mercury also differed from what was predicted, and the hypothetical planet Vulcan was suggested as the cause. Yet after many searches, there was no sign of Vulcan. It wasn't until the general theory of relativity replaced Newtonian gravity that this was cleared up.
Whether we're about to discover another Neptune, or another general relativity, remains to be seen; the point is that the Universe is pulling something weird on us, and that's interesting.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The linked article is a summary of a paper that has an analysis of data not written by the original PAMELA team who collected the data. The PAMELA team have not yet published their data or findings, although apparently have presented them at a conference in Stockholm.
The summary quotes the paper thusly: "The preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish."
I am not familiar with the conference in Stockholm that the PAMELA data were originally presented at, but at every large conference I have attended, it is official policy that no photographs are allowed. Taking unpublished data without permission of the authors is theft, pure and simple. Submitting a paper on that data before the original authors do is unethical.
Certainly, such proclamations are made with scant and incomplete information (it could be that Cirelli and Strumia, the non-PAMELA authors, did indeed get permission from the PAMELA team, and everything is kosher), and I hope that either members of the PAMELA team or authors of the new paper might read Slashdot to explain what's going on.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.