Slashdot Mirror
Dark Matter Discovered Near Solar System?
gpronger writes "The ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter) has potentially discovered the presence of dark matter close (only 3000 light-years) to our solar system. The system detected a large-amount of high energy cosmic rays which match the theoretical signature of dark matter annihilating itself. The universe is believed to be composed of about 25% dark matter, but there has been little evidence of it. This discovery, if correct, would be the first."
The paper was published in Nature , but it requires a subscription to see beyond the abstract.
If you believe that extraterrestrials once lived on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, then every little hill will look like an intelligently designed artifact. If you believe in dark matter, then every little unexplained phenomenon becomes evidence for dark matter. It's mostly a matter of faith. The same goes for all the other weird inventions of cosmology. I see very little science in this sort of things.
Heck, we have no clue, really, as to what make things fall or even why bodies move, and yet some feel they know enough to come up with all sorts of half-baked conjectures based on their incorrect and incomplete understanding. Unless and until physicists can fully explain the true mechanism of movement in language that the layperson can understand, I'll remain highly skeptical of their more outlandish conclusions (black holes, wormholes, dark matter, dark energy, big bang, parallel universes, etc.), sorry.