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90% of the Universe Found Hiding In Plain View
The Bad Astronomer writes "As much as 90% of previously hidden galaxies in the distant Universe have been found by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Previous surveys had looked for distant (10 billion light years away) galaxies by searching in a wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen atoms — distant young galaxies should be blasting out this light, but very few were detected. The problem is that the ultraviolet light never gets out of the galaxies, so we never see them. In this new study, astronomers searched a different wavelength emitted by hydrogen, and voila, ten times as many galaxies could be seen, meaning 90% of them had been missed before."
bazinga ... first
8==F=I=R=S=T==P=O=S=T==D
90% of the Universe was discovered by thinking differently? Steve Jobs just felt a tingle somewhere.
This should stand as a very significant step forward. Hopefully, they can use technology derived from this to make it easier to study planets orbiting distant stars. Hello ET!
It's 90% of the universe's mass!
I wear IR glasses so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.
Anyone got any idea how this impacts our estimates of dark matter?
Does dark matter disappear or do we still need some hiding to explain things?
Does this account for any missing mass and/or dark matter?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Based on article's title, I thought they've found dark matter and dark energy!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
weren't people wondering where 90% of the Universe's mass went? So they started into 'dark matter' and other voodoo stuff. Now that there's been a, what, 10-fold increase in galaxies, and I assume galaxies are a bit heavy (hey, I'm not against fat galaxies, they're just massively gifted), does that answer the 'mass of the Universe' question, or is there more stuff missing still?
Does this discovery do away with the need for the postulated existence of dark matter in cosmological theory?
If we only saw 10% of them before, how do we know we're seeing all of them this time?
...and this isn't the conclusion that I immediately jumped to - the discovery of dark matter. It's merely the discovery of the visible matter that they though should always be there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Scientists on earth were said to be embarrassed by overlooking what had been there all along, and promised to never again take what they have for granted.
"It's like some crappy teen drama, and we just had to wait for the prom scene to realize how beautiful our soft-spoken nerdy friend is."
90% of the universe could not be reached for comment, as it decided itself too good for its unappreciative inattentive "friends" and went to the football players' afterparty.
Merely 90% of the Visible Universe that we couldn't see before.
The Visible Universe probably constitutes a very small (perhaps even infinitesimally small) fraction of the actual physical Universe. The rest will, according to Relativity, always be hidden.
Azural - instrumentals
So what of the theory that the Universe is composed of 90% dark matter that we can't see? Since we just found another 90% of the Universe, does that toss it all right out the window?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... is the same figure used to justify the initial claims for dark matter.
Several initial sources claimed that there had to be abundant non-baryonic matter making up much of the universe, as otherwise, there would have to be about ten times as much normal matter as we were observing, and that, of course was absurd. So quite possibly this is so long to dark matter! Next question is, is there still any reason to postulate dark energy with the new values for average density and so on this will produce? Don't say goodbye to dark energy just yet, but expect some significant revisions.
Who is John Cabal?
There's your missing mass, the Universe is cyclic and will collapse!!!
By no means do I know what I am talking about.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
And AFTER reading the article...
I'll note: this has nothing to do with dark matter. As it happens, 90% of the matter in the Universe is in a form that emits no light, but affects other matter through gravity. We know it exists, and you can find out why here. We know it exists locally, in nearby galaxies and clusters of galaxies, too. This new result doesn't affect that, since the now un-hidden galaxies are very far away, like many billions of light years away. They can't possibly affect nearby galaxies, so they don't account for dark matter.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
People are far too enamored with dark matter. It is extremely frustrating having to place everything in the context of dark matter (often with only the most tenuous connection) when trying to explain interesting observations to the general public. The author of this article, thankfully, made it clear at the top of the article that it was NOT related to dark matter and went on to explain the observation.
They found it behind uranus.
The "Very Large Telescope?" Come on. We can do better than that. I suggest "Really Big Round Glass Thing for Seeing Further."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...the SETI people will announce the discovery that numerous alien civilizations have been busily communicating back and forth using optical links operating in the UV region.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've always found that the universe is in the last place I look, too.
I found one sitting on my sofa when I got home last night, eating Cheetos and watching Oprah. Damn thing was in my spot, too!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Moon Glasses, Moon screen, anyone, cheap!
if 90 percent of the hidden galaxies were found using this method, how do they know there isn't more to be found? What states that there is still 10 percent out there that needs to be found? If you don't have a whole then you can't state a part. they are really going to feel stupid about that statement later
Man, I would love to see his CV:
Discovered 90% of all normal matter in the Universe. Kind of a big deal.
who shutdown the galaxie force fled?
WOW If building a VLT expands the known Universe tenfold, imagine what they could do with a BFT (Big Fucking Telescope).
I thought most of the missing mass of the Universe was tied up in the packing peanuts that are used in shipping the equipment scientists use to search for the missing mass in the universe.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Should have stayed single.
"Hidden in plain view"? So what they are saying is that the universe exhibits the same behavior as my car keys.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The last time I called the thing on my couch a galaxy, she called me a gaseous nebula.
Since we just got a 10 fold increase in galaxies.
I think that moves us from 0.006 to 0.06, (plus one obviously)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
With a recent docco I saw claiming that 95% of the universe had to be Dark Matter and Dark Energy, this simply didn't make sense - and not in the way that Quantum Mechanics doesn't make sense, but in a truly "This just can't be the way it is, how come we are so special we're living made out of stuff that just 5% of the universe is made out of, why aren't we made from dark matter as well?"
Apparently not - from TFA:
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Actually, they called it the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope. Unfortunately, it seems to have shrunk recently.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Scientists can't see the universe through the galaxies.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So.... once we see the remaining 10% we will have reached the "end" of the universe?
Hope is the currency of fools
I'm guessing that this telescope in Chile only looks at the southern part of the sky. Does this mean that 90% of the universe is not visible to northern hemisphere telescopes?
No, I didn't RTFA, this is Slasdot after all.
Shining some light on dark matter.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
But "Really Big Round Glass Thing for Seeing Further" would be abbreviated RBRGTSF which I can't even pronounce let alone remember and "Very Large Telescope" is just VLT.
You should have gotten that it was all visible light, and for galaxies they knew had to be there, from just the summary.
Dark matter isn't dark because they haven't seen it, dark matter is dark because it can't be seen. It's invisible, and doesn't interact with the visible universe except via gravity.
We already know there is a lot more to the observable universe that we just haven't seen yet, we can actually predict pretty accurately how much there is left to find. What we have left to find in the far reaches of the universe only accounts for about 10% of the matter (or at least, something that behaves exactly like matter anyway) in the universe. The rest is hidden from us, and is obviously not any kind of matter we've ever encountered.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Does dark matter disappear or do we still need some hiding to explain things?
Unless all those galaxies really far away explain how our galaxy holds itself together at the speeds its stars rotate, then no, we still need dark matter or some alternative theory like MOND.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why do they call it the Visible Universe, if until this point, they hadn't been able to "see" 90% of it?
That's nice.
Anyone seen my glasses?...
Having driven across Texas from Texarkana to El Paso several times, I knew it was big, but I never imagined Plainview was that large. Still, I've found plenty of things in Plainview before.
...or they phrased it the wrong way.
90% of the known universe was hidden in plain sight, maybe.
Given the nature of the universe, I seriously doubt we'll see it all. Even then, it's hardly "discovered" by looking at it all from this little speck of dust.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Like hide and seek, they just had to pretend to give up the search, and the galaxies got bored and came in for some lemonade, yes?
But I'm wondering if this finding contradicts a few days ago announcement that the movement of galactic clusters is due to mass outside our universe. If our universe now has 90% more mass than it did, now maybe these flows make more sense. At least there's nothing in the article saying "The soon to be announced finding of 9 times the currently known amount of matter does not affect this report."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100322-dark-flow-matter-outside-universe-multiverse/
On your head! Duh!
If this is the solution to the dark matter question, then all those astronomers and astrophysicists have been disturbingly myopic. I studied astrophysics in college for two years and it is precisely this kind of ass-hatted, onanistic speculation which convinced me to switch to comp sci. I really love cosmology, it's just such a shame when we continue to see such fail.
I want my teleportation machine and now I'm never gonna get it.
If you read the article, you would've noticed that it mentioned SEVERAL times that this had NOTHING to do with dark matter.
So science was wrong until they tried something different?
Not surprising. This means science is fallable, and that's probably the hardest lesson that otherwise logical thinkers can face.
How many times have the dinosaurs been renamed?
Just making the point. Someone has to.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Agreed. This particular news story isn't directly relevant to the "dark matter" debate.
Mmm ... alternatively, if there's no dark matter, that'd suggest that Einstein's general theory isn't totally reliable for calculating galaxy-scale gravitational effects. In that case, there's no guarantee that our current GR calculations are correct for the lensing effects associated with the large-scale distortions that might arise when two galaxies collide, either. Gravitational shockwaves associated with forced deceleration (due to collision) aren't stopped by EM radiation pressure, and should keep moving, too.
So we still have at least two interpretations available. If we assume that Einstein's general theory is perfect, then perhaps we have to invoke something very like dark matter to explain why the predictions //appear// to fail for rotating (and colliding) galaxies. On the other hand, if we were to assume that there was no such thing as dark matter, and that Einstein's general theory was simply failing, period, then the failure in the collisional case as well as the rotating case might just mean that the theory is failing //consistently//.
Eric Baird
I've been looking for me for a year...and there I was right in plain view. *shakes fist* darn you Parents for creating a son, a son without it. if you have to ask what it is, you don't have it either. gVibe
Keywords for the NSA overthrow oppressive regime true believers marathon Manhatten the financial district blueprints I
90% more galaxies, but are any of them worth visiting?
klingons
no more matter bailouts for the devious book-cookin' universe.
Table-ized A.I.
it's all solved now.
Table-ized A.I.
Universe is like a balloon. It is expanding at a faster rate. We won't be able to find the limit of this limitless universe. http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2236872
...'cause across the corner of the Hubble photo was a yellow banner that said:
"Now! With 90% MORE Universe!"
I always thought that dark matter was a hack. "our numbers don't add up.. therefore 90% of the universe is a type of matter that has gravity but doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, or anything else, also there's none of it near earth, it's like the 90% that's far away." sounds good to me :-p
Oh thank God! The Universe won't die a cold, lonely and dark death after all. I feel better. Wait. Where is Nemesis now?
not.
now get yourself some vaseline.