Herschel's First Science Results, Eagle Nebula

davecl writes "Over the next three days, many new science results will come out from Herschel. The first of these, a view deep inside the stellar nursery of the Eagle Nebula, finds a huge amount of activity, revealing new stars and filaments of dust that could not have been detected by previous telescopes. Also open today is OSHI, the online showcase of Herschel images where all the new science images will be found. Herschel news also available on the Herschel Mission Blog."

Comments

Re:Can this be used to avoid dark matter?

[radtea]

If Herschel can can find matter previously unseen with other telescopes, can this be used to avoid the dark matter theory?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: there are multiple dark matter problems on multiple scales. Galactic dark matter, which is the only kind Hershel might be able to see, may be baryonic (made up of the same sorts of elementary particles as everything else we know about.) Even that is doubtful, based on dynamical analysis of galactic collisions, which strongly favour a non-baryonic component even on galactic scales. And the thing about non-baryonic dark matter is that whatever it is, it doesn't interact electro-magnetically, at least not to a significant degree. If it did, it would be scattered off ordinary matter and be detectable and visible and have pretty much the same spacial distribution as ordinary matter, which it observably does not in the case of galactic collisions.

On larger scales, we know with as much certainty as we know anything that dark matter must be non-baryonic, and therefore almost certainly won't be visible. The reason we know it must be non-baryonic is because the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the early universe, which we can calculate quite precisely based on the universe we see today, puts a strict limit on the amount of baryonic matter, and the extra-galactic dark matter exceeds that limit by a factor of ten or more.

Finally, "avoiding the dark matter theory" is a funny way of putting things, as if somehow dark matter was bad and it would be a good thing to avoid it. Dark matter is a perfectly sensible explanation some peculiar phenomena, and although it is not the only one, it has proven consistent with the experimental and observational tests that have been used to investigate it, particularly the galactic collision analysis mentioned above.