Slashdot Mirror
Student Finds Universe's Missing Mass
An anonymous reader writes "A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called 'missing mass' of the universe during her summer break."
what'd she do, look behind her?
never gets old
...mouldy bit it'll probably still be tasty if you scrape it off a bit.
It was found down the back of the sofa - it's the first place one should look for missing things.
Telescope must have been upside-down.
Why is it that the younger the person who does something, the more special people think it is? I call it the "America's Got Talent" effect.
Maybe Slashdot should start including the age of everyone mentioned. ("CEO of Microsoft, age 55, throws chair ... ")
Did the missing mass form a black hole which then sucked the server in, it is it just the regular Slashdot effect?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They managed to find a female astrophysics student. Anyone in physics can tell you that is a great discovery in and of itself.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Any astrophysicists (or at least postgrads) here to say how important or true this achievement really is?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Way to go Slashdot!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/Aussie+student+finds+universe+missing+mass/4851185/story.html
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Since the submitter cleverly decided to force people to visit TFA if they want to know what the missing mass actually was, where it is, or how she found it, imagine my disappointment when I couldn't due to a slashdotting.
One could just google for copies of the story. I found tons, e.g.here or a summary here.
Basically, he located the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".
Now why /. can auto-parse some URLs and not others is anyone's guess.
I don't know, but it works for me.
But you'll never catch me!
A student has found that if you observe in the x-ray range you discover ordinary matter between the galaxies that was clearly evident in the early universe and isn't visible in other parts of the spectrum.
I'm not sure that it's altogether news that different frequencies let you see different things - to me, by far the biggest news is that despite having x-ray telescopes for a very long time and computers quite capable of crunching that data to detect potentially interesting observations, the astronomers have been opting for cheap student labor instead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It was your mom!
If I'm reading TFA correctly, this material is mass we already knew had to be around but didn't know where it had gone to. According to TFA, the student in question, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, the mass in question is essentially conventional mass that is in so called "filaments" between galaxies.
What a poorly written article. Plus once I see PC words used like diverse used in anything, I just can't take it seriously. The article sucked.
Any other sources? Looks like slashdot syndrome claims another victim..
The closing line about justifying funding for pure physics research 'Do you use a mobile phone? Some of that technology came about by black hole research'."
To what bit of mobile phone technology is he referring?
It is unwise to ascribe motive
A 22-year-old Australian university student has found your mom. Seriously, she's that huge.
Yes, but did she find Jesus?
I keep getting that question from random people. "Have you found Jesus?" That guy must be seriously lost. I mean worse than Charlie Sheen's television career, or Donald Trump's political ambitions. Totally gone.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Lets go ahead and get all the "your mama" jokes out.
The summary and article are making a mountain out of a mole hill. The student did good work but did not 'find the missing mass' in the universe. Here is a link to the publicly accessible article on arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0711
The abstract does not make any grandiose claims of finding the missing mass of the universe but instead states how the article presents properties of mass in filaments.
...but does it mean that there's no dark matter afterall?
I misread that as "finding Miss Universe's mass" and wondered about the method used.
i read
"Student Finds Miss Universe's Mass"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So that explains why I can never retrieve the information that gets entered into my phone!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
In the last place you look.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
... if this is the explanation for the "freshman fifteen".
Have you seen the excess of mass at McDonalds? And don't get me started on "Kentucky Fried Chicken!"
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It was in Uranus all along.
The universe was hiding its massive girth inside its corset.
There were several very cute female astrophysics grad students at UNM when I went there in 1993. Likely even more of them now.
while packing those crates to leave Australia.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Amelia Fraser-McKelvie
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I thought I had hidden it well..
Well, looks like i'll have to delete the evidence again....
CLEANUP TIME A-HOY!!
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
If the missing mass of the universe is identified it will only take a few minutes for Microsoft to try to patent it.
Perhaps even more surprising is the prof's willingness to share her beauty with the Slashdot crowd: http://www.physics.monash.edu.au/people/research/lazendic.html
She discovered it upon reflecting that women lie about their weight. The missing mass is discovered by asking the husband when he is too drunk to know better than to be honest.
Yes, universe, that dress DOES make you look fat.
I8-D
Crapped yourself again, I take it? Sucks to get old.
I'm sure you'd "tap" her http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Tapping
scientists finally found the "missing mass"; it was the packing materials of their scientific instruments!
It's not that you're wrong, you're just using different metrics. In physics (and astronomy, I think), the authors are usually listed in decreasing order of work done, starting with the person who did the most. The people at the end of the list have done so little work, why are they even on the paper? Because, as you say, they are listed in increasing order of importance (read: amount of grant money received). If you have enough people, sometimes they just throw them all into alphabetical order and pretend that everybody reading the CVs of the people who actually did the work will somehow know that they did.
This guide may also be helpful: PHD's Guide to the Author List
Actually it seems she didn't find anything:
"Ms Fraser-McKelvie said the ‘Eureka moment’ came when Dr Lazendic-Galloway closely examined the data they had collected. “Using her expert knowledge in the X-ray astronomy field, Jasmina (Dr Lazendic-Galloway) re-analyzed our results to find that we had in fact detected the filaments in the results, where previously we believed we had not.”"
So the student found nothing, it wasn't until an expert looked at it and actually found the mass.
So I guess it depends on your perspective as to if the student found it or not. If you're throwing out a bunch of "junk" and an expert goes through it and discovers a priceless artifact does that mean you discovered it or did the expert?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Wow a young woman seems to figure out one of the greatest mysteries of our era, you make a snarky comment implying that she's fat. That must be why there are so few 'geek' women, as the boys apparently go strait for the gut when a lady seems smarter than they. Sadly there doesn't seem to be much discussion about this that isn't sophomoric banter.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Oh my GOSH! Really? The Universe's missing mass?? I bet it only shows up on Christmas and Easter! The Universe will certain go to hell for that!!
No to mention that it appears time/space/gravity/velocity are all inter-related and effect each other. 15 minutes at the speed of light is different than 15 minutes standing still.
Only from the frame of a outside observer. And if the universe is in an stage where it is expanding at 50% of the speed of light, how are you going to observe from an outside frame of reference? Also, 'standing still' is kind of tricky. Standing still compared to what? The expanding universe?
Which is to say, if we could see far enough in a certain direction, into the past, we might actually be able to witness the big bang occurring.
Since the big bang is modeled as a point source of energy expanding outward, wouldn't that require the photons being emitted from it to strike the eye of an observer that is outside the universe? (which is by definition of the universe pretty much impossible.) You can see galaxies 14 billion years away/ in the past because they formed after the big bang and then started emitting light. The only way you are going to 'see' the big bang is if the universe is closed (curves back on itself). You can 'see' the background temperature in the microwave spectrum though, which was once of the more spectacular theories proven in the 20th century.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...when I ask "Is she hot?" ...followed by "Does she want to join my D&D campaign?"
The guy who followed the instructions to lay the bricks didn't design the cathedral.
Nor did Fraser-Mckenzie "discover" the missing mass.
But for some reason this undergrad has got most of the popular credit when the usual process is to give the underlings who did some grunt work no credit at all.
Why is that?
God told me that women are on earth to be fucked, but in her case, he can make an exception
But definitely not for being immune to neurotoxin.
Well have you seen her pictures? Nothing against her personally but she is quite heavy.
Stereotypes usually exist for a reason.
I have a missing mass in my pants.
OMG! HE is now a SHE! 0_0
Don't see him in the Internet Pope Database...
Did you even see her picture? She's quite attractive.
The student is female and Australian.
The Australian press will drop everything else the moment they find a story which they think may be of interest to the rest of the world.
Australians have a deeply ingrained inferiority complex, compounded by a desperate yearning to be American (something which comes from being ashamed and embarrassed about being Australian).
So they will do anything they can to bring themselves to the world's attention, or, better still, the attention of the USA.
It's why they try so hard to infiltrate outfits such as Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=australia
In 1991 it was found that the Logopolitans were using block transfer computations to model Charged Vacuum Emboitments (CVEs) as a means of excising off excess entropy from this universe into others as to stave off the imminent heat death of the universe. Matter could pass through these CVE's into other universes (such as E-Space). See LOGOPOLIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logopolis
Not that those movies were works of art, but this sounds like the plot to a pretty horrible sequel ...
That must be why there are so few 'geek' women, as the boys apparently go strait for the gut when a lady seems smarter than they. Sadly there doesn't seem to be much discussion about this that isn't sophomoric banter.
Guys insult guys on a regular and persistent basis, but they don't break down, cut their hair and transfer to Womyn's Studies. (Or whatever young women do who can't hack male-dominated domains.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yes, yes I did.
"Quite" attractive? LOL, whatever buddy. I wouldn't call her ugly, more like "neutral chunky."
If she can find my missing ballpoint pens - that would be something!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Couldn't spell to Pond ;-)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Why perhaps because she is humble and hard working?
She says the ‘Eureka’ moment came after Dr Lazendic-Galloway examined the data collected. “Using her expert knowledge in the X-ray astronomy field, Jasmina reanalysed our results to find that we had in fact detected the filaments in our data, where previously we believed we had not.” Ms Fraser-McKelvie said in the press release.
This breakthrough discovery in determining the amount of mass contained in the filaments, as scientists have been making deductions based on numerical models until now.
Although she is still a year away from undertaking Honours, Ms Fraser-McKelvie’s work has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a terrific achievement for an undergraduate. “Being a published author is very exciting for me, and something I could never have achieved without the help of both Kevin and Jasmina.” she said.
“Their passion and commitment for this project ensured the great result and I am very thankful to them for all the help they have given me and time they have invested.”
From the original article as posted on Science Illustrated's website.
Emphasis is mine but the quotes clearly point out her level of gratitude and humbleness or would you like to attach some other meaning to it?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
...oh, there it is.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Hidden treasures are there that can explore great things, it needs to be checked out the calucalations
Are you implying that the reason most assistants don't receive majority credit is because they don't have enough "gratitude and humbleness"? That the mountains of grad students who often make an intellectual contribution beyond mere grunt work are ignored because they would refuse to acknowledge the contribution of their supervisor? And that it is fine to mislead the public as long as the subject is humble about it? Present your argument, please. Because what I see are dozens of articles implying that F-M was at the centre of the discovery when in fact she only made a minor contribution.
Look at most scientific discoveries described in the press. Notice how they try, no matter how challenging, to describe the discovery rather than the person. Something is wrong here. What do you think it is?
I hope she found it in the kitchen since that's where she should have been.
Not sure on this point, but something is missing, at least I think we are missing some data to really decide if there is something else going on or not.
While I think your question is valid, to a point, I think a lot of professors do not give credit where credit is due, or at least "page one credit". My own experience is with two professors at UC Berkeley who do give "page one credit" if it is truly due, but YMMV.
I can only postulate that the young woman's role is not explained completely in the various articles and that it can only be determined if and when the lead researchers detail it.
But if the leads on this were willing to place the young lady under the very bright light that will be cast upon this particular bit of research AND she is willing to be there then I can only really draw two conclusions:
1. She DID discover something critical that lead to a re/closer examination of the data and thus the resultant paper.
2. All three of them are really stupid by setting the young lady up for an epic fail when it turns out that she did nothing of note.
If my first conclusion ( the one that I prefer to be correct ) is correct then she has a very promising career going forward as she progresses and the leads recognize this and being established researchers want to give her career a big boost and open doors for her that would not be open for your basic undergrad.
I cannot see my second conclusion being correct for any reason since the two professors have a lot at risk here if the story is truly BS. In the scientific community your reputation is everything since if it is tarnished, especially in the attribution of serious scientific work, then getting your next grant would be in serious peril and few people would be willing to work with you.
The only other thing that I can possibly imagine would be that they wanted some really good press on this and so they put here on the cover as eye candy. Given the magnitude of this discovery, everyone and I do mean everyone, is going to be crawling all over this work, I do not see any reason why they would need to do so since the work could have profound impact on a lot of things.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Ah, well.... We're told not to be too upset if our submission is not accepted. But, I had a "prior art" submission on this. :-)
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.